Small-Scale Testbeds for Connected and Automated Vehicles and Robot Swarms: Challenges and a Roadmap

arXiv cs.RO / 3/25/2026

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Key Points

  • The article presents a roadmap to tackle challenges in small-scale testbeds for connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) and robot swarms, based on a workshop held in June 2024 at IEEE IV 2024.
  • It outlines three main focus areas: improving accessibility and diversity (especially for underrepresented communities), sharing best practices for building and maintaining testbeds, and enabling collaboration by connecting testbeds via an abstraction layer.
  • The workshop that informed the roadmap included eight invited speakers, four contributed papers, and a survey paper compiling comparative information on more than 25 testbeds.
  • It provides links to an online testbed survey table and the workshop website, supporting continued community reference and coordination.
  • Overall, the proposal aims to make testbeds more interoperable and sustainable, lowering barriers to participation while strengthening cross-testbed collaboration.
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Abstract

This article proposes a roadmap to address the current challenges in small-scale testbeds for Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs) and robot swarms. The roadmap is a joint effort of participants in the workshop "1st Workshop on Small-Scale Testbeds for Connected and Automated Vehicles and Robot Swarms," held on June 2 at the IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV) 2024 in Jeju, South Korea. The roadmap contains three parts: 1) enhancing accessibility and diversity, especially for underrepresented communities, 2) sharing best practices for the development and maintenance of testbeds, and 3) connecting testbeds through an abstraction layer to support collaboration. The workshop features eight invited speakers, four contributed papers [1]-[4], and a presentation of a survey paper on testbeds [5]. The survey paper provides an online comparative table of more than 25 testbeds, available at https://bassamlab.github.io/testbeds-survey. The workshop's own website is available at https://cpm-remote.lrt.unibw-muenchen.de/iv24-workshop.