USARSim: Providing a Framework for Multi-robot Performance Evaluation

Research efforts in urban search and rescue robotics have grown substantially in recent years. Two important robotic competitions (a robot physical league and a high-level infrastructure simulation league) were established in 2001 under the RoboCup umbrella to foster collaboration amongst institutions and to provide benchmark test environments for system evaluation. While these leagues play valuable roles, a significant gap existed between simulating disaster infrastructure and implementing agent behaviors on real hardware. In this paper we describe a software simulation framework intended to be a bridge between these communities. The framework allows for the realistic modeling of robots, sensors, and actuators, as well as complex, unstructured, dynamic environments. Multiple heterogeneous agents can be concurrently placed in the simulation environment thus allowing for team or group evaluations. This paper presents a description of the simulation along with results from the RoboCup 2006 Virtual Robot Competition in which it was used and a roadmap of the framework’s future directions.