Programming Modular Robots in a Simulated Environment for Hardware Control Validation

Abstract

This paper presents a simulation environment to control modular robots in a program which is directly applicable for hardware control. Computer simulations provide a powerful tool for visualizing robotic systems as evidenced by myriad environments developed for prototyping, designing, and testing robots. In the presented simulation environment, code written for hardware control can be validated within the simulation with a minor modification due to the close integration of the hardware and simulation control software. The simulation environment is built atop Ch, the C/C++ interpreter which provides the capability to remotely control robots through code, Open Dynamics Engine, which accurately models the dynamics of the bodies, and OpenScene-Graph, used to provide 3D visualization. Multiple experiments were run which proved the accuracy of the simulation by comparing results with the hardware control code in both single- and multi-robot situations.