CORNET 2.0: A Co-Simulation Middleware for Robot Networks
This addresses the need for co-designing autonomy and communication protocols in multi-robot systems, but it is incremental as it extends existing tools.
The paper tackles the challenge of simulating multi-robot systems by developing a co-simulation framework that integrates physical interactions and communications, enabling seamless synchronization and easy migration to real platforms.
We present a networked co-simulation framework for multi-robot systems applications. We require a simulation framework that captures both physical interactions and communications aspects to effectively design such complex systems. This is necessary to co-design the multi-robots' autonomy logic and the communication protocols. The proposed framework extends existing tools to simulate the robot's autonomy and network-related aspects. We have used Gazebo with ROS/ROS2 to develop the autonomy logic for robots and mininet-WiFi as the network simulator to capture the cyber-physical systems properties of the multi-robot system. This framework addresses the need to seamlessly integrate the two simulation environments by synchronizing mobility and time, allowing for easy migration of the algorithms to real platforms. The framework supports container-based virtualization and extends a generic robotic framework by decoupling the data plane and control plane.