Wireless testbed for Next-Gen Connected Robots

 Ubiquitous network connectivity has changed the way we design and maintain computing systems – there is no better illustration than our computers and phones automatically downloading patches and updating themselves throughout their lifetime. We can anticipate a similar and possibly more profound impact on design of next generation intelligent autonomous machines – or robots. Unmanned vehicles like cars, drones etc will greatly benefit from ubiquitous connectivity – even more so if the latency and quality are guaranteed. However exploring these technologies, their associated challenges, and potential solutions, requires state of the art  testbeds which will allow researchers to easily create, measure and study various scenarios – both in the network side as well as the application side. Given the cost and engineering  challenges in creating and operating such testbeds, we believe an open source, collaborative and a networked approach to create the testbeds themselves, across multiple centres around  the world will foster rapid acceleration, development and dissemination of next-gen connectivity technologies and solutions. This talk will further outline this vision and our attempts at creating such a testbed in IISc for connected robots.