Robotics is a motivating fun subject, but also very time-consuming. Getting to know all details of of some new robots can take a very long time, finding out how to compile and upload programs, understanding a complex API (Application Programmer Interface), etc.
But resources at universities are always limited, especially when (potentially supervised) access to expensive hardware such as robots is involved.This means students have very limited time to solve a task during a weekly lab session (typically 3 hours at UWA Engineering), in which they have to complete a project from start to finish. Students can preparation for such a lab only by reading documentation and sketching a solution – in most cases they cannot even compile their program, let alone run it.

All these issues demonstrate that a realistic robot simulation system with an API identical to that of the real robots could play a vital role in student learning in robotics: If such a tool can be used on standard PCs and free of charge and limitations, then students can in their own time, at home or at university, prepare a robotics lab to the point where the complete application can be designed, compiled and run/tested on a simulated robot environment. All that will then be required in the lab is the (hopefully small) step of transferring the application form the simulation environment to the real robot with some adaptation and fine-tuning.

Students will be able to spend their preparation time much more efficiently and will get immediate feedback from such a simulation system. As there will be no time limit on its usage, all students will benefit from this solution and improve their learning and understanding of robotics subjects.

The proposed system shall run on all popular computing platforms: Windows, MacOS, and Linux. It will allow the construction of a virtual environment and the interaction of multiple mobile robots in this environment. Simulation results are to be close enough to reality to allow a transfer of simulation results to real robots.