An intelligent robotics simulator

An intelligent robotics simulation system is described. The purpose of the robot simulator is to act either as an interactive robot modeling and simulation tool, or as an execution environment for robotics task plans generated by higher-level planners. It provides features for modeling of manipulators, environment configuration, manipulator control, and status reporting. The execution of the plans is performed in a graphics simulation environment and after successful completion the commands can be transmitted to physical robot hardware. The system provides an interactive simulation environment where every command entered by the user is immediately executed and the results are displayed on a graphics screen. From this interactive environment users can change the simulation scenario and operate the robot manipulator models in the system. Advanced features of the simulator that are described include: composite objects supporting the linking of separate objects into a composite object which can be operated on as a unit while presenting the separate accessibility of its components; configuration management with the provision of an automatic configuration selection mechanism based on a set of heuristic rules; collision detection which provides a way to check for collisions during a simulation run; collision avoidance where the simulator provides a heuristic path planning algorithm which is capable of recovering from collision situations to provide collision-free path plans, and interface to control physical robots with the capability of generating command sequences for real robot controllers. >