VC-bots: a vehicular cloud computing testbed with mobile robots

Smart vehicles with computing, sensing, and communication capabilities are gaining popularity. With various vehicular applications equipped, these smart vehicles not only improve driving safety, but also facilitate data collection and information sharing for traffic optimization, insurance estimation, and infotainment. However, developing and testing such cloud based vehicular application is challenging due to the high cost of running the application on actual cars in various traffic scenarios. For the same reason it is also difficult to understand and model the network protocol behavior among multiple vehicles. In this paper we proposed VC-bots, a vehicular cloud testbed using mobile robot vehicles, which can emulate different types of vehicles for testing vehicular network protocols and vehicular cloud applications in various scenarios, which can be easily reconfigured without any infrastructure assistance. To facilitate software integration, we also developed a message based service framework for applications running on the robot vehicle and in the cloud.