The Cambridge RoboMaster: An Agile Multi-Robot Research Platform
<|reference_start|>The Cambridge RoboMaster: An Agile Multi-Robot Research Platform: Compact robotic platforms with powerful compute and actuation capabilities are key enablers for practical, real-world deployments of multi-agent research. This article introduces a tightly integrated hardware, control, and simulation software stack on a fleet of holonomic ground robot platforms designed with this motivation. Our robots, a fleet of customised DJI Robomaster S1 vehicles, offer a balance between small robots that do not possess sufficient compute or actuation capabilities and larger robots that are unsuitable for indoor multi-robot tests. They run a modular ROS2-based optimal estimation and control stack for full onboard autonomy, contain ad-hoc peer-to-peer communication infrastructure, and can zero-shot run multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) policies trained in our vectorized multi-agent simulation framework. We present an in-depth review of other platforms currently available, showcase new experimental validation of our system's capabilities, and introduce case studies that highlight the versatility and reliabilty of our system as a testbed for a wide range of research demonstrations. Our system as well as supplementary material is available online: https://proroklab.github.io/cambridge-robomaster<|reference_end|>
@article{blumenkamp2024the,
    title={The Cambridge RoboMaster: An Agile Multi-Robot Research Platform},
    author={Jan Blumenkamp, Ajay Shankar, Matteo Bettini, Joshua Bird, Amanda
  Prorok},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.02198},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2405.02198},
    primaryClass={cs.RO cs.MA cs.SY eess.SY}
}