Player-Stage Based Simulator For Simultaneous Multi-Robot Exploration And Terrain Coverage Problem

Abstract

One of the possible ways of offering assistance without risking additional human lives during hazardous situations is by deploying a robot team, equipped with various sensors and actuators. Working with intelligent robotics requires a large investment in both money and time. There is a general purpose, open source simulator called Player/Stage, which provides a hardware abstraction layer to several popular robot platforms, and is commonly used by robotics community in research and university teaching, today. This simulator tends to be very simple and task-specific. Player, which is a distributed device server for robots, sensors and actuators, can control either a real or simulated robot thus allowing direct application of developed algorithms to real-life scenarios. Hence, we believe that Player/Stage, when coupled with robust hardware, is a viable paradigm for our Simultaneous MSTC(S-MSTC) algorithm. This paper gives details of our experience in running Player/Stage during the implementation of our online S-MSTC algorithm for multi-robot being implemented in C++ and we use Player/Stage middleware for validation and testing. In addition, the experience with Player/Stage can help us to do research in more complicated situations.