When someone wants to make experiments in the
mobile robots research area, two alternatives are possible:
to accomplish the experiments directly in a real
robot; or to make experiments using a simulated robot.
The use of a real robot is more realistic, but the simulation
have the following advantages[26, 15]:
• When using simulated robots, doesn’t exist the risk of
robot damages;
• Tasks as the exchange and recharge of batteries are not
necessary;
• The robot positioning in order to restart a simulation
can be accomplished automatically, without human
intervention;
• The simulation clock can be accelerated, reducing the
total amount of spent time for learning;
• Several different architectures and robot models can
be tested before to do an expensive practical construction
of the robot. In this way it is possible to test and
select the best robot model to construct.
For these reasons, we chose to implement our initial
experiments using a simulated robot, through the implementation
of a very realistic robot simulator, using
a physical simulation engine, so we can build simulated
robots very similar to the real models.