MSDN TV interview. ROCI: Multi-Robot Teams Built on .NET. AvArcher, Tom & Andrew Whitechapel. Inside C# Second Edition. Williams, Mickey. Microsoft Visual C# .NET. Redmond, WashingFinal Project Description April 11, 2005 CSE 401 Multiple Autonomous Robots Simulator Brad Rosenbaum ([email protected]) Sanzar Kakar ([email protected]) Faculty Advisor: Camillo J. Taylor ([email protected]) Abstract: The goal of this project is to create a computer simulator for the GRASP Lab’s Multiple Autonomous Robots (MARS) project. The MARS project involves creating a system by which a group of autonomous robots can be controlled remotely and can coordinate with each other to perform certain tasks. Testing with the actual robots can be very time consuming. After setting the robots up and plugging everything in, you may find that there is a minor error in the instructions that cause the robots to behave in a manner that you can’t understand. There is also a risk factor when using the real robots. If something should go wrong the result might be a broken robot. This is why creating a computer simulator for this system would be a worthwhile endeavor. The robots are monitored and controlled through a piece of software called ROCI (Remote Objects Control Interface). There is an open source piece of software for simulating robots in three dimensions called Gazebo (that we may work on top of) to create the simulator. Thus our work would be mostly to bridge the two pieces of software so that given a set of instruction in ROCI the simulated robots will behave in Gazebo in the same fashion that the real robots would in the physical worldOur desired final project would be a piece of software that can easily simulate the MARS robots while possibly being controlled from multiple machines. Related Work: ROCI: A Distributed Framework for Multi-Robot Perception and Control, ROCI Control Manual, Dr. Taylor’s MSDN.tv interview The ROCI software is used by the GRASP Lab for many projects including the MARS project. The ROCI software allows multiple robots to be controlled and monitored from a single computer. ROCI can give robots different tasks that are comprised of clearly defined modules that can be used over and over again. Different robots have different sensory capabilities (cameras, etc) and can send data to each other that allows them to make decisions about how they will behave. Stage/Gazebo Software WebsiteGazebo and Stage are open-source pieces of software that can simulate robots in an outdoor environment. Gazebo can simulate physics and many of the sensory abilities that may be available in robots (including the MARS robots). It has built into it many models of commonly used robot types. It can be run on Linux and a patch for Windows has just recently been implemented Mobile Robot Simulator (MOBS) MOBS is a “fully 3-dimensional simulation system for mobile robot systems.” The sensors modeled are odometry, bumpers, sonar sensors, and camera view. Its strength lies in the fact that the “simulator can be connected to a robot application program even without re-compilation of the application program.” Available: http://robotics.ee.uwa.edu.au/mobs/ Cyberbotics Webots Webots is another mobile robotics simulator that provides a “rapid prototyping environment for modeling, programming and simulating mobile robots”. Available: http://www.cyberbotics.com/products/webots/ System for Parallel Agent Discrete Event Simulation (SPADES) SPADES is a middleware simulator for mobile AI robots with “continual sense-think-act cycle interaction with the simulated world”. The robot’s behavior is mainly tracked by the computation time required for given processes. Its strengths lie in “out of order execution of simulation events, as well as being robust to variations in the network and machine load.” Available: http://spades-sim.sourceforge.net/ Newtonium RoboWorks Simulator Newtonium provides a more commercially available simulator, that work with the open source RoboTalk interface for real-time communication with their RoboWorks models. Available: http://www.newtonium.com/ Why the proposed project is different from what already exists Our work allows the user to send commands to the simulated robots through the ROCI interface, the same interface they use to control the physical robots for the MARS project as well as other GRASP Lab projects. Computers Used White Dell XPS T450 Ret Hat Linux. Root password: gazebo User: sanzar/gazebo Gag Dell Dimension 8200 Debian. Root password: derkaderka User: sanzar/gazebo Escolar Dell Precision 360 Debian, Windows XP. Root password: with Ben User: sanzar/gazebo UAV Dell Precision 650Windows XP. User: sanzar/gazebo Technical Approach: Our goal for this project was to create a way to allow a user to interface with ROCI and conduct a virtual computer simulation of how physical robots would behave if given the same set of tasks. There were a number of design decisions to be made to go about achieving this. First, we had to decide whether to write the graphical simulator from scratch in OpenGL (most likely using Visual C++), or to use a pre-existing robot simulator. The advantage of writing the simulator from scratch is that we could choose the language it was written in, the options we wanted, and the kind of information we wanted available. We would be fully aware of how the simulator works and how to deal with it. Many of the existing simulators are open-source and could be used as a model to base ours on. We could even build it into ROCI if we wanted to. Those advantages aside, writing a three-dimensional graphical simulator is a long and arduous process and gives us one more thing to worry about in error-checking. Using an established robot simulator, while somewhat limiting us to what is made available by the designers, saves us time and allows us to focus our energy on other more crucial aspects of the project. After discussing our options with our adviser Dr. C.J. Taylor, as well as two members of the MARS project group, Anthony Cowley and Ben Grocholsky, we decided to use Gazebo software from the Player/Stage project. Second, we had to decide what operating system(s) we would use. ROCI is written in C# on the .NET framework, meaning that it is Windows based. The Gazebo software is designed to run on Linux. So we were presented with basically three options: run it all on