A few days ago, I was looking for a way to simulate my robot’s sensors and potential vision tasks. The first thing I came across was the Webots Robot Simulator, which became open source relatively recently in 2018.
I ran through the tutorials, which were pretty easy to follow, but also have the solution files in case you get stuck. They focus on the fundamentals of Webots, so don’t expect to be modelling your PiWars robot perfectly straight away. For example, below is a screenshot of my ‘4-Wheels Robot’ from the tutorial.
I would like to model my Devastator robot, but the shape is a little more complex than a box and uses tracks rather than wheels. Luckily, there is a Track node that I can use. My main focus would be to prototype the running of the robot with the various sensor nodes available.
While this appears to be a great piece of software (once you get through the steep learning curve), I may be adding more stuff to do that delays building and testing my actual robot. If anyone has used this software, I’d love to hear your experiences.
PostDoc Pi @ Pi Wars 