ARGoS: a Modular, Multi-Engine Simulator for Heterogeneous Swarm Robotics

We present ARGoS, a novel open source multi-robot simulator. The main design focus of ARGoS is the real-time simulation of large heterogeneous swarms of robots. Existing robot simulators obtain scalability by imposing limitations on their extensibility and on the accuracy of the robot models. By contrast, in ARGoS we pursue a deeply modular approach that allows the user both to easily add custom features and to allocate computational resources where needed by the experiment. A unique feature of ARGoS is the possibility to use multiple physics engines of different types and to assign them to different parts of the environment. Robots can migrate from one engine to another transparently. This feature enables entirely novel classes of optimizations to improve scalability and paves the way for a new approach to parallelism in robotics simulation. Results show that ARGoS can simulate about 10,000 simple wheeled robots 40% faster than real-time.

Publication type: 
Contributo in atti di convegno
Author or Creator: 
Pinciroli, Carlo
Trianni, Vito
O'Grady, Rehan
Pini, Giovanni
Brutschy, Arne
Brambilla, Manuele
Mathews, Nithin
Ferrante, Eliseo
Di Caro, Gianni
Ducatelle, Frederick
Stirling, Timothy
Gutierrez, Alvaro
Gambardella, Luca Maria
Dorigo, Marco
Publisher: 
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers,, New York, NY , Stati Uniti d'America
Source: 
2011 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2011
Date: 
2011
Resource Identifier: 
http://www.cnr.it/prodotto/i/308388
urn:isbn:978-1-61284-455-8
Language: 
Eng
ISTC Author: 
Vito Trianni's picture
Real name: