MM-ulator: Towards a Common Evaluation Platform for Mixed Mode Environments

We investigate the interaction of mobile robots, relying on information provided by heterogeneous sensor nodes, to accomplish a mission. Cooperative, adaptive and responsive monitoring in Mixed-Mode Environments (MMEs) raises the need for multi-disciplinary research initiatives. To date, such research initiatives are limited since each discipline focusses on its domain specific simulation or testbed environment. Existing evaluation environments do not respect the interdependencies occurring in MMEs. As a consequence, holistic validation for development, debugging, and performance analysis requires an evaluation tool incorporating multi-disciplinary demands. In the context of MMEs, we discuss existing solutions and highlight the synergetic benefits of a common evaluation tool. Based on this analysis we present the concept of the MM-ulator : a novel architecture for an evaluation tool incorporating the necessary diversity for multi-agent hard-/software-in-the-loop simulation in a modular and scalable way.