Rapid Development of a Mobile Robot Simulation Environment

TL;DR

This paper presents a 3D mobile robot simulation environment built with Unity, which accelerates software testing and hardware development for robotics competitions, demonstrating significant practical benefits.

Contribution

The paper introduces a rapid development approach for a mobile robot simulation environment using Unity, tailored for competition testing and hardware-software integration.

Findings

Simulation environment improved software testing efficiency

Contributed to hardware development process

Enabled testing in diverse scenarios

Abstract

Robotics simulation provides many advantages during the development of an intelligent ground vehicle (IGV) such as testing the software components in varying scenarios without requiring a complete physical robot. This paper discusses a 3D simulation environment created using rapid application development and the Unity game engine to enable testing during a mobile robotics competition. Our experience shows that the simulation environment contributed greatly to the development of software for the competition. The simulator also contributed to the hardware development of the robot.