ARCS: A unified environment for autonomous robot control and simulation

A common approach for developing robotic systems leverages separate simulation and control softwares. Although this approach requires minimal coordination and orchestration between softwares, the separation of simulation and control applications presents the designer with unnecessary challenges during development. This paper describes the Autonomous Robot Control and Simulation (ARCS) software, a unified control and simulation environment developed on a common software stack for real world control and simulated experimentation. This unification is attained through the use of a modular data pipeline that allows for data to be generated in simulation, taken from real hardware, or taken from log files. The unification of real world control and simulation software and the adaptability of this pipeline allows for some unique advantages. These include more meaningful virtual experimentation, a streamlined functionality to perform hardware in the loop tests, and the ability to replay collected log files from both simulation and real world testing. This allows more rapid iterative development cycles of autonomous behaviors. This software stack was used to develop three marine robotics platforms, which will serve as an example to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of this unified approach.