A Research Tool for the Power and Performance Analysis of Sensor-Based Mobile Robots

摘要

Contemporary sensor-based robotic systems tend to use an ad-hoc combination of off-the-shelf components for onboard computational needs. The number and type of sensors present, the number and organization of the onboard processors, and the algorithms utilized for processing high bandwidth realtime sensor data present researchers and designers with a wide range of choices for which they are currently ill-equipped to evaluate the best options. We present a co-simulation framework for sensor-based mobile robots that allows for the power and performance analysis of custom embedded computing platforms for mobile robots with a range of onboard sensors. We demonstrate the utility of our co-simulation framework by analyzing the power and performance tradeoffs for the computational subsystem of a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with onboard camera sensor performing image processing tasks while operating in a custom virtual testbed.