Building a parallel, research-grade multi-agent robotics lab at Georgia Tech — enabling active experimentation on swarm coordination and motion capture systems without taking the existing Van Leer robotarium offline.
<img src="robotarium-01.png" alt="Robotarium Lab">robotarium-02.pngrobotarium-03.pngrobotarium-04.pngThe Georgia Tech Robotarium in Van Leer is a premier multi-agent robotics research facility — but as an active research platform, it can't be taken offline for experimental modifications. This project is building a parallel robotarium from the ground up to enable research into improvements to the existing system without disrupting ongoing work.
The new lab involves setting up a full motion capture infrastructure, networking stack, and multi-robot coordination software — end-to-end hardware and software integration as a research project.
Optitrack Motion Capture SystemSetting up an Optitrack infrared camera system to precisely localize robots in 3D space. Each robot carries infrared markers, and the camera array triangulates their exact positions and orientations in real time — a critical input for any coordination algorithm.
Networking ArchitectureArchitecting the communication stack between the robots, a MATLAB backend for algorithm execution, and an MQTT message broker for lightweight pub/sub messaging between nodes. The system is designed with a planned migration to ROS (Robot Operating System) as it matures.
Multi-Robot Coordination AlgorithmsDesigning and implementing algorithms for simultaneous movement of multiple robots — including collision avoidance, formation control, and path planning for a fleet of agents operating in a shared physical space.
Research DocumentationSystematically documenting all hardware setup, software architecture decisions, and algorithm implementations to support future researchers building on this platform.