Simulating multi-million-robot ensembles

Various research efforts have focused on scaling modular robotic systems up to millions of cooperating devices. However, such efforts have been hampered by the lack of prototype hardware in such quantities and the unavailability of accurate and highly scalable simulations. This paper describes a simulation framework for such systems, which can model the execution of distributed software and the physical interaction between modules. We develop a scalable, multithreaded version of an off-the-shelf physics engine, and create a software execution engine that can efficiently harness hundreds of cores in a cluster of commodity machines. Our approach is shown to run 108x faster than a previous scalable simulator, and permit simulations with over 20 million modules.