Cogrsim: A robotic simulator software

Abstract

Robot simulator is highly necessary and useful because it could provide flexibility and repeatability in robotic research, and the user is able to freely exert his imagination to design robot environment and algorithms. This paper presents CogRSim, a robot simulator which offers four features that differentiate it from most existing ones: (1) 3-dimensional scene could be viewed synchronously in 2-dimensional panel, which makes the user easy to observe the interaction process between the robots and environment; (2) user-defined experimental result might be displayed in appropriate style similar to Matlab; (3) the user can adjust the simulation speed, pause, restart, slower or faster; (4) some objects can be assembled into a complex one in arbitrary shape and unified physical attribute. CogRSim's architecture and subsystems are described in detail, and then a navigation experiment is carried out to verify its usability.