A Simulation Environment for Bluetooth Equipped Mobile Robots

The Bluetooth radio system is an ideal communications tool for lightweight autonomous mobile robots but little research interest has been targeted at this application. We present in this paper an environment which allows behavior-based autonomous mobile robotic simulation to take advantage of synthetic Bluetooth communications. Two components comprise our system. A highly adaptable mobile robot simulation arena providing an extensible behavior-based control architecture and secondly our Bluetooth modelling framework providing accurate Bluetooth device interaction. This paper describes the design and integration of these two systems to form a complete environment and any additional components which are required. In particular we examine the communications software stack, provided to each robot in the simulator. From a programmatic perspective we highlight the interface that this communications stack presents to each robot in order to create discrete reactive behaviors for the control architecture. Finally a description of a successful experiment using this simulator is also presented.