Development of a Simulator of Environment and Measurement for Autonomous Mobile Robots Considering Camera Characteristics

In this paper, a simulator of environment and measurement that considers camera characteristics is developed mainly for RoboCup four legged robot league. The simulator introduces server/client system, and realizes separation of each robot’s information, introduction of each robot’s difference and distribution of processes. For producing virtual images, the simulator utilizes OpenGL and considers the effects of blur by lens aberration and so on, random noise on each pixel, lens distortion and delayed exposure for each line of CMOS device. Some experiments show that the simulator imitates the real environment well, and is a useful tool for developing algorithms effectively for real robots.