ORCA: A physics based, robotics simulator able to distribute processing across several peers

Abstract

The nature of the research and development workflow in robotics has reshaped drastically during the last decade. Activities are fundamentally interdisciplinary and usually wide-spread across several research institutions. To cope with these new requirements, researchers are increasingly using simulation to communicate algorithmic developments, and seamlessly integrate their work into larger projects. In the current paper we present the ORCA simulator, a versatile 3D-based physics simulator that was designed to facilitate those needs. ORCA integrates a middleware backend directly into the server-simulator environment, making the sharing of resources amongst peers a seamless task. To this end, we present ORCA's main features, its ability to load and render large environments, as well as the capacity of the simulator to share resources amongst different workstations.