Abstract
We present a novel multi-robot simulator named ARGoS. ARGoS is designed to simulate complex experiments involving large swarms of robots of different types. ARGoS is the first multi-robot simulator that is at the same time both efficient (fast performance with many robots) and flexible (highly customizable for specific experiments). Novel design choices in ARGoS have enabled this breakthrough. First, in ARGoS, it is possible to partition the simulated space into multiple sub-spaces, managed by different physics engines running in parallel. Second, ARGoS’ architecture is multi-threaded, thus designed to optimize the usage of modern multi-core CPUs. Finally, the architecture of ARGoS is highly modular, enabling easy addition of custom features and appropriate allocation of computational resources. We assess the efficiency of ARGoS and showcase its flexibility with targeted experiments. Experimental results demonstrate that simulation run-time increases linearly with the number of robots. A 2D-dynamics simulation of 10,000 e-puck robots can be performed in 60 % of the time taken by the corresponding real-world experiment. We show how ARGoS can be extended to suit the needs of an experiment in which custom functionality is necessary to achieve sufficient simulation accuracy. ARGoS is open source software licensed under GPL3 and is downloadable free of charge.
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Notes
Each machine has two AMD Opteron Magny-Cours processors type 6128, each processor with 8 cores. The total size of the RAM is 16 GB.
However, the sense+control and act phases are still executed in parallel.
With N=105 robots, ARGoS used about 800 MB of RAM.
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Acknowledgements
The research presented in this paper was carried out in the framework of Swarmanoid, a project funded by the Future and Emerging Technologies programme (IST-FET) of the European Commission under grant IST-022888. This work was also partially supported by the ERC Advance Grant “E-SWARM: Engineering Swarm Intelligence Systems” (grant 246939), and by the EU project ASCENS (grant 257414). Giovanni Pini acknowledges support from Université Libre de Bruxelles through the “Fonds David & Alice Van Buuren”. Manuele Brambilla acknowledges support from the Fund for Industrial and Agricultural Research FRIA-FNRS of Belgium’s French Community. Nithin Mathews thanks Wallonia-Brussels-International (WBI) for its support in the form of a Scholarship for Excellence grant (IN.WBI). Arne Brutschy, Rehan O’Grady, Mauro Birattari and Marco Dorigo acknowledge support from the Belgian F.R.S.-FNRS, of which they are a Research Fellow, a Postdoctoral Researcher, a Research Assistant and a Research Director, respectively.
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Pinciroli, C., Trianni, V., O’Grady, R. et al. ARGoS: a modular, parallel, multi-engine simulator for multi-robot systems. Swarm Intell 6, 271–295 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11721-012-0072-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11721-012-0072-5