Strategies for Using a Simulation in the Development of the Bremen Autonomous Wheelchair

Abstract

This paper presents a pragmatic approach to the simulation of an autonomous mobile system, the Bremen Autonomous Wheelchair. The software architecture allows to directly switch between simulation and reality. The major idea of this paper is not to try to build a perfect simulation of the target system from scratch, but to let the simulation evolve during the experiments with the real system. INTRODUCTION There is no disputing that simulations are useful tools in the development of autonomous mobile robotics systems. Hence, most commercial mobile robotics platforms are shipped with simulator packages that imitate the system's behavior, e.g. the Nomad 200 or the Pioneer. However, these simulations are very specialized. As the mobile robot is only able to move in 2-D space, the environments that can be modeled are also restricted to two dimensions. In addition, the packages only simulate the sensors the original robot is equipped with, and it is impossible to include additional sensors. ...