Symbricator3D - A distributed simulation environment for modular robots

Abstract

A distributed simulation environment is introduced in this paper that allows to simulate robot swarms as well as modular robots. This simulator is in use within the European projects 'SYMBRION' and 'REPLICATOR'. The project's main goal is to build robots that can aggregate to multi-robot organisms. These robots will be able to act individually, as a swarm or within an organism. The simulator needs to be able to simulate all of these behaviors. As the number of robots can be large, both in the swarm as well as in the organism, the simulator needs to be distributed on several computers. As the demand varies between the different behaviors -swarm and organism behavior- the behavior of the simulator needs to vary as well, e.g. for a swarm, a dynamic simulation is not necessary, whereas for an organism, a fast dynamic simulation is obligatory. We are therefore developing the Symbricator3D simulation environment, that will fulfill all the described requirements. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.