MIMIC: a robot planning environment integrating real and simulated worlds

The authors describe MIMIC, an interactive multirobot programming environment and robot vision system which allows program development and testing in an integrated real and simulated world. In this environment programs under development can easily be fed either to a real or to a simulated robot. When operating in the simulation mode the robot environment appears as a mix of the real and simulated worlds, called partial simulation. This is created by combining real image data obtained from the robot vision system with graphical simulation techniques, which thus allows simulation to mirror the real world more closely than completely graphical simulation. The advantages of this integrated approach over separate offline graphical robot simulators are discussed and demonstrated by a number of applications, including an interactive programming application and a two-robot task involving collision avoidance