Methodology and design principles for a generic simulation platform for distributed robotic system experimentation and development

The high cost of acquiring and operating a collection of advanced autonomous mobile robots for distributed robotic system (DRS) experiments stimulates the interest of developing a generic, real-time, virtual reality based simulation platform. The specification and design principles for such a system is presented. New concepts introduced in the paper include levels of users for the simulation platform, abstract sensors/actuators; the bandwidth of sensing/actuating devices, the bandwidth of a robot and that for the simulation platform; integrating hard systems with computer simulation; and simulated concurrency. A multiprocessor based DRS simulation platform, currently being developed at the Robotics Laboratory, UC Riverside, is used as an example.