SwarmJS: Swarm Robotics Simulation on the Web

SwarmJS is a web-based simulation platform developed to prototype, benchmark, and showcase controller algorithms for multi-robot systems. There are a number of existing robot simulators, but only a few which target multi-robot systems. Those that do target multi-robot systems make use of complex software frameworks that can make them difficult to install and challenging for beginners to use. We address this gap by developing a simple and flexible simulator as a web application written in JavaScript, making it immediately accessible without the need for any installation or local configuration process. Users can interact with the robots and write control code directly in the browser. SwarmJS is tailored towards swarms of mobile robots operating in the plane and engaged in tasks such as aggregation, collision avoidance, object clustering, object sorting and planar construction. In this paper we present the motivation and design for SwarmJS and showcase its features on the tasks mentioned above.