A Video Game-Based Mobile Robot Simulation Environment

Simulation is becoming an increasingly important aspect of mobile robots. As we are better able to simulate the real world, we can usefully perform more research in simulated environments. The key aspects of a good simulator, an accurate physics simulation and realistic graphical rendering system, are also central to modern computer games. In this paper, we describe a robot simulation environment built from technologies typically used in computer video games. The simulator is capable of simulating multiple robots, with realistic physics and rendering. It can also support human-controlled avatars using a traditional first-person interface. This allows us to perform robot-human interaction and collaboration studies in the simulated environment. The distributed nature of the simulation allows us to perform large-scale experiments, with users participating from geographically remote locations