Distributing a mobile robot simulator using remote procedure calls

The architecture of a distributed mobile robot simulator is presented. A sequential simulator for conducting experiments in path planning and sensor fusion is first implemented. The computationally intensive sections of the simulator are then identified. To exploit the fact that some of these computations may be performed in parallel, a distributed version of the simulator is implemented on a network of heterogeneous computers running variants of the UNIX (BSD) operating system. The various processes in the simulator communicate over Ethernet using remote procedure calls. The paper also discusses the performance issues involved in distributing the simulator