Robot3D — A simulator for mobile modular self-reconfigurable robots

A heterogeneous, mobile, self-reconfigurable and modular robot platform is being developed in the projects SYMBRION and REPLICATOR. The locomotion of the robots as well as forming of the robot organisms will be controlled using evolutionary and bio-inspired techniques. As the robots are not available at the beginning of the projects and experiments are time consuming and carry risks of damaging the robots, the evolutionary algorithms will be run using a simulation. The simulation has to provide realistic movements of a swarm of robots, simulating the docking procedure between the robots as well as simulating organism motion. High requirements are imposed on such a simulator. We developed the Robot3D simulator, which dynamically simulates a swarm of mobile robots as well as robot organisms. In this paper we will give an overview of the simulation framework, we will show first results of performance tests and we will present applications for which Robot3D has already been used.