MARS: An Educational Environment for Multiagent Robot Simulations

Undergraduate robotics students often find it difficult to design and validate control algorithms for teams of mobile robots. This is mainly due to two reasons. First, very rarely, educational laboratories are equipped with large teams of robots, which are usually expensive, bulky, and difficult to manage and maintain. Second, robotics simulators often require students to spend much time to learn their use and functionalities. For this purpose, a simulator of multiagent mobile robots named MARS has been developed within the Matlab environment, with the aim of helping students to simulate a wide variety of control algorithms in an easy way and without spending time for understanding a new language. Through this facility, the user is able to simulate multirobot teams performing different tasks, from cooperative to competitive ones, by using both centralized and distributed controllers. Virtual sensors are provided to simulate real devices. A graphical user interface allows students to monitor the robots behaviour through an online animation