View Simulation System: a mobile robot simulator using VR technology

Abstract

Simulation is an important issue in robotics research because it is essential for evaluating and predicting the behavior of a robot. However conventional simulators don't have the function of simulating the visual perception process. This indicates that it is impossible to simulate the vision-based behavior of a robot. In this paper, we propose a new simulation system "View Simulation System (VSS)", which is designed to simulate the behavior of a mobile robot equipped with vision. VSS has vision processing hardware, and can run any programs including vision processing for our real mobile robots. To show the feasibility of the simulator, we applied it to the evaluation of our visual navigation method.