CyberEarth: a Virtual Simulation Platform for Robotics and Cyber-Physical Systems

The increasing sophisticated robot and intelligent system applications require universal visualization platforms which can guarantee the security and efficiency of task process execution in the situation of user-programming and using different kinds of automated equipment. In this paper, we present a universal visualization framework to build up program-driven simulation software of complex robots and intelligent systems by integrating several open-source technical modules, including Ubuntu Linux operation-system, QT Creator IDE environment, ROS robot operation system, OSG(OpenSceneGraph) 3D scene, osgEarth GIS(Geographic Information System)-based 3D scene, and also Python based user-programing robotic script language. Many complex visualization simulation systems of complex tasks in wide area and dynamic scenarios are realized by using this framework. Based on this framework, we built a virtual simulation platform CyberEarth for robotics and Cyber-Physical systems. The typical robotic simulation task, which is a visual coverage task for Multi-Agent/UAV, is also introduced to demonstration the universality of this platform.