Kilombo: a Kilobot simulator to enable effective research in swarm robotics

The Kilobot is a widely used platform for investigation of swarm robotics. Physical Kilobots are slow moving and require frequent recalibration and charging, which significantly slows down the development cycle. Simulators can speed up the process of testing, exploring and hypothesis generation, but usually require time consuming and error-prone translation of code between simulator and robot. Moreover, code of different nature often obfuscates direct comparison, as well as determination of the cause of deviation, between simulator and actual robot swarm behaviour. To tackle these issues we have developed a C-based simulator that allows those working with Kilobots to use the same programme code in both the simulator and the physical robots. Use of our simulator, coined Kilombo, significantly simplifies and speeds up development, given that a simulation of 1000 robots can be run at a speed 100 times faster than real time on a desktop computer, making high-throughput pre-screening possible of potential algorithms that F Jansson and M Hartley contributed equally to this work. F Jansson · R Dries · J Kandorp Computational Science Lab, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands E-mail: [email protected] M Hartley · M Hinsch · T Olsson · A Marée · V Grieneisen John Innes Centre, Norwich Research Park, Norwich NR4 7UH, United Kingdom E-mail: [email protected], E-mail: [email protected] I Slavkov · N Carranza · J Sharpe Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG), The Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology, Dr. Aiguader 88, 08003 Barcelona, Spain I Slavkov · N Carranza · J Sharpe Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), Barcelona, Spain J Sharpe Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA), Passeig Llúıs Companys 23, 08010 Barcelona, Spain R Dries Department of Bionanoscience, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands J Grönqvist Department of Physics, Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland ar X iv :1 51 1. 04 28 5v 2 [ cs .R O ] 9 M ay 2 01 6