Modelling a Crawler Robot Using Wheels as Pseudo-Tracks: Model Complexity vs Performance

Crawler mobile robots have a large variety of applications, including urban search and rescue. Before new algorithms and concepts could be integrated into a real robot control system and tested in field experiments, extensive virtual simulations should be performed in order to verify them carefully. This requires a proper modelling of a robot in a virtual environment, but a specific construction of crawler robot crawlers complicates the modelling. In this paper, in order to provide a high level of physical interaction similarity of a crawler with a supporting surface we model crawlers of mobile robot Servosila Engineer with a set of virtual wheels and study a relationship between a model complexity and a simulation performance. The model complexity is reflected by a number of virtual wheels that approximate each crawler of the robot. Verification experiments were performed in ROS/Gazebo simulator.