Simulator Implementing Uncertainties in Motion for Robots in a Network

Abstract

This paper presents a simulator for multiple robot system. The simulator implements the uncertainties in the robot motion. The robots in the simulator are connected using the IPC (Inter Process Communication) which is based on TCP-IP. The simulator consists of the four units: communication, robot control, kinematic design, and driver for real robot operation. The robot control unit uses Gaussian noise to incorporate the uncertainties of robot motion. The real robots and virtual robots can operate in parallel. Also, by providing only the link parameters, a new robot can be added. Some application examples show that the simulator is useful and indispensable for verification of algorithms especially for complicated multiple robot systems. Moreover, it is shown that motion uncertainty of the robot plays an important role to evaluate the robustness performance of an algorithm.