General Purpose Multi-Agent Robotic System

This work describes the hardware and software implementation of a General-Purpose MultiAgent Robotics System (GP-MARS) designed to implement and test multi-agent algorithms. This system utilizes the Robot Operating System (ROS) infrastructure for distributed control of multiple robotic units, enabling hardware abstraction and reducing dependency on specific hardware components. This flexibility allows for testing a wide variety of multi-agent algorithms. This paper details the hardware and software components of the system, along with validation experiments conducted to demonstrate its capabilities. Additionally, the potential of such a system for advancing multi-agent robotics research is discussed.