Client: Bristol Robotics Laboratory, United Kingdom
Date:October 2017 - February 2018
Website: https://nuclearrobots.org
My roles: Technical research and development
Robotics for Nuclear environments was a research project between the University of Manchester, University of the West of England and the University of Birmingham
that studies how multi-robot systems can be used for safe decommissioning of nuclear plants. One of the challenges that the project faced at its beginning was
how to facilitate software development collaboration between the partner institutions, allowing each team to work independently but also share solutions.
Research
My first role in the project was to gather requirements from all the team members and
recommend a simulation environment that was extendable, relatively feature-rich
and computationally efficient. To do this, I implemented multi-robot simulations in
V-REP, Gazebo and ARGoS and performed a number of
benchmark tests involving different
robot team and virtual world sizes, as well as different computer setups.
The research was published in
Pitonakova, L. et al (2018) Proceedings of the 19th Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems Conference.
Development

Based on my recommendation, the team decided to use the V-REP simulator, mostly because of its extendability and the ease of importing 3D models
of various robotic platforms. I created a
simulation environment in V-REP featuring a nuclear reactor model and a system of
C++ plugins for V-REP
that enabled multiple simulated and real robots, developed independently by the
partner institutions, to operate in a common virtual environment held in a "master" computer. This was achieved by using
custom communication protocols that worked
over wi-fi.
Another useful feature of this system of components was the
possibility to stream the state of the entire simulated world,
including that of real robots, into a high-end rendering application that could, for instance, provide a virtual reality visualization of the robot mission.
I demonstrated this capability by developing a 3D visualization application that could run on a different computer than the "master" simulation and display
what the robots were doing.