Improving and designing sensors for the Simulation Environment for Autonomous Robots (SEAR)

Several new developments have been integrated into the Simulation Environment for Autonomous Robots (SEAR), which is a newly developed platform agnostic three-dimensional robotics simulator. The range sensors, which have previously been validated against actual hardware [1] were improved to enable full 3D capabilities and a new class of light detection and ranging (LIDAR) class has been added. The compass sensor was improved to include magnetic declination calculations when given the robot's latitude and longitude. External communications is now handled via TCP and UDP messages shared with an external program users can utilize to set up and control robotics simulations.