Robotics competitions are increasing in complexity and number challenging the researchers, roboticists and enthusiastic to address the robot applications. One of the well-known competition is the micromouse where the fastest mobile robot to solve a maze is the winner. There are several topics addressed in this competition such as robot prototyping, control, electronics, path planning, optimization, among others. A simulation can be used to speed-up the development and testing algorithms but faces the gap between the reality in the dynamics behaviour. In this paper, an open source realistic simulator tool is presented where the dynamics of the robot, the slippage of the wheels, the friction and the 3D visualization can be found. The complete simulator with the robot model and an example is available that allow the users to test, implement and change all the environment. The presented results validate the proposed simulator.

This paper presents a simulation model of a Time of Flight distance sensor applying SimTwo robotics simulator in order to contribute to a mobile robotics application, in an educational context. The objective is to observe the sensor behavior, inside the simulation environment, face a set of experiments, such as an abrupt difference of distance, several angle inclinations and measurements to the maximum sensor range. The tests were performed using SimTwo being a high performance, open source, versatile, real time simulation environment, in which is possible to configure an specific sensor adding its features, which allows to achieve a realistic simulation. The results represented the expected sensor behavior for the proposed scenarios.