An investigation of robot behaviours within a simulated environment

A design for a simulator to test autonomous mobile robots is discussed in this work. Only a partial implementation of this simulator was realized. Most of the work for the simulation world has been completed but the area concerning the running of robot programs for use in this world has not. The simulator’s intent was to model a world of obstacle, one target location and one mobile robot. The target location is supposed to represent the location of an incapacitated person at risk. A successful run of the simulation is one where a mobile robot finds its way to this target location within, at least, a reasonable amount of time and the robot using some search algorithm to reach it. A way of creating a map of this world where a user can add obstacles and one target location by using a graphical user interface has been implemented. Currently, it is possible to store these maps of differing worlds as files and later to load them from files