Development of a Dynamic Mobile Robot Simulator for Astronaut Assistance

The need for robotic assistance has been identified to be essential in space exploration missions. This work is targeted for a centauroid robot, called WorkPartner, which is currently being developed to work interactively with astronauts. This paper describes SimPartner, a dynamic robot simulator of the WorkPartner robot by using ODE (Open Dynamics Engine) software. The software incorporates an accurate model of the robot, including part lengths, masses, joints, actuators and sensors. The model can be used in real time to estimate forces and torques that would be difficult to measure from the actual robot, develop robot control code and to predict robot behavior e.g. in tele-operated tasks. The contribution of this paper is to show that it is possible to create a verifiable real-time dynamic mobile robot simulator for a centaur-like mobile service robot. This is achieved by comparing the simulation data with measurements from the actual WorkPartner robo