Procedural City Generation for Robotic Simulation

In robotics, simulation plays a fundamental role for testing the models and techniques in a controlled environment prior to conducting experiments on real physical agents. In addition, some kind of scenarios can be easily reproduced within a simulator which is not always possible with a real robot. Building simulation environments, however, can be a tiresome and complex task. For robots performing in an urban environment, manually designing a city for testing navigation or localization algorithms can be prohibitive. As an alternative, in this work, we propose the use of procedural graphic techniques aimed at producing synthetic cities that can be employed within a robotic simulator. Experiments with the generated environments have been performed on a real simulation tool to assess the viability of the approach here proposed.