RoaDS — Robot and dynamics simulation for biologically-inspired multi-legged walking robots

Increasing computational power and efficient physics engines make robotic simulations popular and applied in more and more domains and scenarios. Well established simulators like GAZEBO have become an important part in robotics research. Nevertheless, non of the popular simulators addresses the needs of multi-legged walking robots. In this work, we develop an efficient and precise simulation system for multi-legged robots: RoaDS. The requirements, architecture and distributed design are presented. A series of experiments with the six-legged walking robot LAURON evaluates and confirms its high accuracy and good performance. RoaDS is a great tool to compare designs of bio-inspired robots, analyze walking patterns and improve robot walking skills.