An interactive simulator for networked mobile robots

This article presents an interactive simulator for formation control of wireless networked robots. The formation control is achieved thanks to the application of consensus algorithms of multi-agent systems which are executed in a distributed manner. Each vehicle sends to its neighbors the state, and they use this state to compute their control law. The agents communicate through a packet-based network. Different scheduling schemes are provided: time-based and event-based, with different event trigger functions. The user can configure the topology of the network, define delays in the communication links, packet-dropout rates or induce error in the transmission of the packets. The user can test the system in a large number of possible scenarios and interact with the simulation by just drag-and-drop actions. Four cases of study are provided to show some of the capabilities of the simulation tool.