  The Kilobot is a widely used platform for investigation of swarm robotics.
Physical Kilobots are slow moving and require frequent recalibration and
charging, which significantly slows down the development cycle. Simulators can
speed up the process of testing, exploring and hypothesis generation, but
usually require time consuming and error-prone translation of code between
simulator and robot. Moreover, code of different nature often obfuscates direct
comparison, as well as determination of the cause of deviation, between
simulator and actual robot swarm behaviour. To tackle these issues we have
developed a C-based simulator that allows those working with Kilobots to use
the same programme code in both the simulator and the physical robots. Use of
our simulator, coined Kilombo, significantly simplifies and speeds up
development, given that a simulation of 1000 robots can be run at a speed 100
times faster than real time on a desktop computer, making high-throughput
pre-screening possible of potential algorithms that could lead to desired
emergent behaviour. We argue that this strategy, here specifically developed
for Kilobots, is of general importance for effective robot swarm research. The
source code is freely available under the MIT license.
