Simulation Performance

Our simulation has been tested on a PC cluster, consisting of four 3.0 GHz Pentium-IV computer, running Linux OS. Tab. I shows the performance of the system. To achieve a seamless integration of simulation and real robot control software we rewrote Kurt's control software to handle all devices in a non-blocking fashion. The control loop runs as fast as possible and whenever new device data is present, the data gets processed. Standard Linux device drivers are used to buffer and hold back data.

Table I: Computing time of the devices (Pentium-IV-3000) using different simulated RoboCup Rescue arenas. For comparison: The real KURT2 yields encoder ticks with a frequency of 100 Hz, laser scans with 75 Hz and camera images with about 10 fps.

Kurt3D device	computing time (4 PC cluster)	computing time (single computer)
scanner (181 values)	50ms	200ms
gyro (INU sensor)	50ms	200ms
encoder sensor	50ms	100ms
camera	400ms	400ms

The simulated 3D scanner needs 61 sec for acquiring a 3D scan of 181 $\times$ 120 3D data points. This result is due to the fact that setting the servo motor values in Unreal is not instantaneous.