Small-Size Robot Platform as Test and Validation Tool for the Development of Mechatronic Systems

The development of mobile robots or in general autonomous mobile systems is a complex task. These systems are characterized by a set of sensors and actuators as well as software running on computing hardware. Depending on the foreseen tasks of designing a mobile system, the overall complexity of the design may range from a few integrated components to several tens of sensors and actuators including distributed information processing mechanism. Besides system modeling and simulations, the design process involves system testing by performing several experiments. A difficult part in this testing phase is to identify the relation between the observed system behavior and the underlying implemented hardware component or part of software. With our test environment and a specific validation method, an iterative design cycle can be enabled that helps to speed up the design process as well as achieve the system behavior that is defined by the specification.