Seamless Robot Simulation Integration for Education: A Case Study

We present a seamless integration of a robotics simulator and hardware implementation, in which the same code can be executed unchanged in simulation or on a physical robot. We discuss the design challenges and our resulting architecture, which seamlessly integrates V-REP, a widely used robotics simulator, with iRobot Create 2 robots. Our approach is easy to set up, simple to understand, yet powerful enough to be useful beyond the classroom. We demonstrate the versatility of our approach by describing an undergraduate-level course in robotics that uses our framework, comparing it to a previous course which did not use simulation tools.