What is Simbad ?

Simbad is a Java 3d robot simulator for scientific and educationnal purposes. It is mainly dedicated to researchers/programmers who want a simple basis for studying Situated Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and more generally AI algorithms, in the context of Autonomous Robotics and Autonomous Agents. It is not intented to provide a real world simulation and is kept voluntarily readable and simple.

Simbad enables programmers to write their own robot controller, modify the environment and use the available sensors. Don't think of it as a finite product but merely as an opened framework to test your own ideas.

The Simbad project is hosted at SourceForge. Simbad simulator is free for you to use and modify under the conditions of the GNU General Public Licence.

Main features

Simbad provides the following features:

• 3D visualisation and sensing.
• Single or Multi-robots simulation.
• Vison Sensors : Color monoscopic camera.
• Range Sensors : sonars and IR.
• Contact Sensor : bumpers.
• Swing User interface for control.

Simbad extensions

Simbad is also provided with a Neural Network library (PicoNode) and an Evolutionary Algorithms library (PicoEvo). These can be downloaded separately, so as to provide a complete package for Evolutionary Robotics.

Mailing list

Suscribe to the simbad-users Mailing list (it is a low traffic list) to obtain informations about Simbad releases.

Download & Install

Requirements

Simbad is written entirely in Java. Thus it only requires Java language (1.4.1 or later) and Java3D library (1.3.1 or later). It is compatible with any platform providing those two components. Simbad is known to run on Mac Os X , Windows XP and some Linux distributions.

Why Java ?: because it is now clearly competitive in performance with c++ and provides a better reliability/portability/openness compromise from an applicative point of view.

Download

You can download either the binary containing juste the compiled classes:

• simbad-[version].bin.jar

• simbad-[version].src.tar.gz .
• simbad-[version].src.zip .

Version control

Simbad is now avalaible under Subversion. You can also access files via svn repository. Note that this feature should be used preferably by advanced users.

Installation

Prior to Simbad installation you must have installed Java3D - You can get Java3D here: for MacOsX, for Windows and for other platforms .

Once this is done you can simply run the simulator:

Or expand the source archive anywhere and compile the java files. The starting class is simbad.gui.Simbad.

Java Web Start

Besides the classic installation procedure described above, you can also launch a demo of Simbad from your internet browser via Java Web Start (providing that you have installed java3d): Launch Simbad Java Webstart

Simbad contributors

The main contributors for this projet are :

• Louis Hugues : Project Initiator - Developper - Project Admin.
• Nicolas Bredeche: - Developper - Project Admin.

References

• Simbad : an Autonomous Robot Simulation Package for Education and Research: an academic paper written by Louis Hugues and Nicolas Bredeche (published in Proceedings of The International Conference on the Simulation of Adaptive Behavior and in Springer's Lecture Notes in Computer Sciences / Artificial Intelligence series).


• Robots, mazes, and subsumption architecture: a useful paper written by Paul Reiners. Introduces a subsumption architecture based on Simbad in the Algernon sourceforge project.


• Open source robotics toolkits: written by M. Tim Jones, an interesting discussion about robotics toolkits, Simbad among others.