The MRSim (Multi-Robot Simulator) is an extension of the Autonomous mobile robotics toolbox SIMROBOT (SIMulated ROBOTs) created for MatLab 5 in 2001. MRSim allows the user to simulate the behavior of multiple mobile robots in virtual environments. When compared to its predecessor SIMROBOT, MRSim presents two key contributions:
1) It is fitted to the new MatLab versions - Previously, users were unable to work with SIMROBOT functions since most of them were incompatible with the new MatLab versions. MatLab significantly evolved over the last 10 years, making SIMROBOT obsolete. In this extension, all features of SIMROBOT were updated and improved based on the new MatLab functions;
2)It is also fitted to suit multi-robot applications - although SIMROBOT was endowed with various interesting features for mobile robotics, it presented several limitations for multi-robot applications. Therefore, MRSim was created primarily to allow users to develop multi-robot applications, which would benefit working with some specific requirements such as multi-hop communication.
Moreover, most of the functionalities in MRSim have an integrated help (which can be accessed just by typing help function) that allows to easily understand the dynamics of how to create and run simulations. In sum, just like SIMROBOT, each robot in MRSim can be equipped with several virtual sensors and can be driven by its own control algorithm. The toolbox includes two independent applications. The first one is the EDITOR (simedit), which allows the user to create and modify the virtual environment,to edit the control algorithms of robots, to load and save simulation, and others. The second application, SIMULATOR (simview), can be run directly from the EDITOR or separately from MatLab Command Window and serves as a simulation viewer.
A MatLab help file is being currently created and will be add in the future.
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