Towards Real-Time Capable Simulations with a Containerized Simulation Environment

The handling of non-rigid objects, such as cables, with industrial robots is characterized by nonlinear, time-dependent and location-dependent equations for the object's behavior. To manipulate them in a desired way, real-time capable simulations for control that are able to run in cycle-time are required as well as highly accurate and detailed simulations for path planning. We introduce a common simulation environment that is wrapped in a container with the advantages of including all dependencies and being easy to set up and orchestrate. Automated code generation is used to set up a standardized communication and virtualization in a Docker container such that only the simulation itself has to be provided by a user. The advantage of containerization, compared to the simulation running natively, is finally demonstrated with a sample robot simulation under heavy CPU load.