A significant challenge in control theory and technology is to devise agile and less resource-intensive experiments for evaluating the performance and feasibility of control algorithms for the collective coordination of large-scale complex systems. Many new methodologies are based on macroscopic representations of the emerging system behavior, and can be easily validated only through numerical simulations, because of the inherent hurdle of developing full scale experimental platforms. In this paper, we introduce a novel hybrid mixed reality set-up for testing swarm robotics techniques, focusing on the collective motion of robotic swarms. This hybrid apparatus combines both real differential drive robots and virtual agents to create a heterogeneous swarm of tunable size. We validate the methodology by extending to higher dimensions, and investigating experimentally, continuification-based control methods for swarms. Our study demonstrates the versatility and effectiveness of the platform for conducting large-scale swarm robotics experiments. Also, it contributes new theoretical insights into control algorithms exploiting continuification approaches.

翻译：控制理论和技术面临的一个重大挑战是设计灵活且资源消耗更少的实验，以评估面向大规模复杂系统集体协调的控制算法的性能和可行性。许多新方法基于系统涌现行为的宏观表征，但由于构建全尺寸实验平台的固有障碍，这些方法通常只能通过数值模拟进行验证。本文提出了一种新颖的混合现实混合实验装置，用于测试群体机器人技术，重点关注机器人集群的集体运动。该混合装置将真实差分驱动机器人与虚拟智能体相结合，构建了一个规模可调的异构集群。通过将连续化控制方法扩展到更高维度并进行实验研究，我们验证了该方法的有效性。研究表明，该平台在进行大规模群体机器人实验方面具有通用性和高效性，同时为利用连续化方法的控制算法提供了新的理论见解。