A simulation based architecture for the development of an autonomous all terrain vehicle

In this work we describe a simulation environment for an autonomous all-terrain mobile robot. To allow for extensive test and verification of the high-level perception, planning, and trajectory control modules, the low-level control systems, the sensors, and the vehicle dynamics have been modeled and simulated by means of the V-Rep 3D simulator. We discuss the overall, i.e., high and low-level, software architecture and we present some validation experiments in which the behavior of the real system is compared with the corresponding simulations.