[Tyler]

Roborobo! A Fast Robot Swarm Simulator
11 April 2013, 9:46 pm

 

Looking for a multi-platform, portable, and fast simulator for large-scale robot swarm and collective projects? Look no further. EU researchers backed by the EU FET Proactive Initiative and other robotics research grants, have developed Roborobo! Coded in C++, it relies on the SDL 2D graphic library, and provides a basic robot similar to the e-puck and Khepera robots. And Roborobo! is licensed under the BSD license, meaning it respects the users freedoms in all the ways suggested by the Free Software Foundation and Open Source Initiative. Here's how the authors compare Roborobo! to other available robot simulators:

"With respect to other robotic simulators, Roborobo! takes an intermediate approach to model a robotic setup in order to combine (pseudo-)realistic modelling with fast-paced simulation. As such, it stands in between realistic, but slow, robotic simulation framework (such as Player/Stage, Webots, V-Rep, Gazebo or Microsoft Robotic Developer Studio), and unrealistic, but easy to use, agent based simulation tools such as Netlogo and MASON. It also differs from easy-access and fast robotic agent simulators such as Breve and Simbad, by focusing solely on swarm and aggregate of robotic units, focusing on large scale population of robots in 2-dimensional worlds rather than more complex 3-dimensional models"

The image above shows three sample screen captures from Roborobo! with 1, 100, and 5000 robots respectively. You can download the complete source code to Roborobo! from the roborobo repository at Google code. A modified version of the code, known as RoboRoboOrganism is available that offers support for modular robot organisms. For a brief technical overview of the Roborobo! simulator, see the paper Roborobo! a Fast Robot Simulator for Swarm and Collective Robotics (PDF format).

Source: robots.net

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