Simulating Kilobots Within ARGoS: Models and Experimental Validation

Carlo Pinciroli, Mohamed S. Talamali, Andreagiovanni Reina, James A. R. Marshall, Vito Trianni

Abstract: The Kilobot is a popular platform for swarm robotics research due to its low cost and ease of manufacturing. Despite this, the effort to bootstrap the design of new behaviours and the time necessary to develop and debug new behaviours is considerable. To make this process less burdensome, high-performing and flexible simulation tools are important. In this paper, we present a plugin for the ARGoS simulator designed to simplify and accelerate experimentation with Kilobots. First, the plugin supports cross-compiling against the real robot platform, removing the need to translate algorithms across different languages. Second, it is highly configurable to match the real robot behaviour. Third, it is fast and allows running simulations with several hundreds of Kilobots in a fraction of real time. We present the design choices that drove our work and report on experiments with physical robots performed to validate simulated behaviours.