xybotsim

XY Bot Simulator

Run extremely simple simulations of "turtlebot" style robots.

Features

• 🤖 Test robot controllers written in Go with software-in-the-loop simulations.
• 💯 Run large scale multi-agent scenarios with hundreds of robots.
• 💥 Simulate robot collisions with obstacles and other robots.
• 📘 Connect your code easily with the most simple API.
• 📺 Visualize simulations in real-time with a minimal GUI.

But don't get your hopes too high, this will be dots moving on a grid 😅 If you are looking for a proper robotics simulator, you should checkout Gazebo.

XY Bot Simulator's design is actually very minimalist :

• Simulated world is a 2D squared grid.
• Robot moves from cell to cell with a chosen velocity.
• Movement is discrete & limited to adjacent cells (no diagonal).

Prerequisites

To run your simulations using XY Bot Simulator you will need Go version 1.17 or later, a C compiler and your system's development tools. Although XY Bot Simulator is virtually supported on any platforms with Go and a C compiler, it has been fully tested only with macOS 13 on Apple Silicon.

Using the standard Go tools you can install XY Bot Simulator's core library using:

go get github.com/floriankarydes/xybotsim

Getting Started

Open a new file my_simulation.go and you're ready to setup your first simulation!

package main

import (
  "github.com/floriankarydes/xybotsim"
)

func main() {

  // Create a new simulator with a 10x10 world grid.
  simulator := xybotsim.NewSimulator(10)

  // Spawn a new robot in simulator world on cell (5,5).
  // Set robot velocity to 1 cell per second
  robot, _ := simulator.AddRobot("robot", 5, 5, 1)

  // Command the robot in a 1x1 square pattern (async)
  go func() {
    for i := 0; i < 4*3; i++ {
      switch i % 4 {
      case 0:
        robot.EnqueueCommand(xybotsim.North)
      case 1:
        robot.EnqueueCommand(xybotsim.East)
      case 2:
        robot.EnqueueCommand(xybotsim.South)
      case 3:
        robot.EnqueueCommand(xybotsim.West)
      }
    }
  }()

  // Display the simulated world on screen
  simulator.Show()
}

And you can run that simply as:

go run my_simulation.go

It should look like this:

The black square is a robot and the cells marked as occupied are greyed out. When moving from one cell to another, a robot occupy both cell for the duration of the movement.

Going further

Please checkout the examples available to learn how to run more complex simulation scenarios. Full documentation is available on pkgo.dev.