BeeGround - An Open-Source Simulation Platform for Large-Scale Swarm Robotics Applications

This paper presents an open-source simulation platform developed for implementation of both homogeneous and heterogeneous robotic swarm scenarios. BeeGround is a fully modular simulation software that allows for a variety of experimental setups with different robotic platforms and population sizes. Users are able to define environmental conditions, e.g. size, various properties like temperature and humidity, and obstacles arrangements. The swarm controller, the individual's behaviour, is defined with a separate programming script. In this paper, we simulated honeybees aggregation mechanism as a case study to investigate the feasibility of the developed simulation platform. The results demonstrated that the developed platform is a reliable simulation software for implementing multi-agent and swarm robotics scenarios with very large population sizes, e.g. 1000 robots.