Improving and designing sensors for the Simulation Environment for Autonomous Robots (SEAR)

Several new developments have been integrated into the Simulation Environment for Autonomous Robots (SEAR), which is a newly developed platform agnostic three-dimensional robotics simulator. The range sensors, which have previously been validated against actual hardware [1] were improved to enable full 3D capabilities and a new class of light detection and ranging (LIDAR) class has been added. The compass sensor was improved to include magnetic declination calculations when given the robot´s latitude and longitude. External communications is now handled via TCP and UDP messages shared with an external program users can utilize to set up and control robotics simulations.