RoboNewbie: A Framework for Experiments with Simulated Humanoid Robots

Abstract

The RoboNewbie project is a basic framework for experimenting with simulated humanoid robots. It serves as an inspiration with introductory experiments for beginners, and it provides room for further challenging experiments. While real robots of this complexity need large efforts for usage and maintaining, the simulated robots run on common computers (e.g. laptops) after short time of installation. They run in the environment of SimSpark RCSS, the official RoboCup 3D simulator for simulated soccer playing robots. The soccer scenario of RoboCup and the related competitions are a well known initiative to foster Artificial Intelligence and Robotics using a popular setting. The simulated robots are models of the humanoid Robot NAO of the French Company Aldebaran. The RoboNewbie framework provides easily understandable interfaces to simulated sensors and effectors of the robot as well as simple control structures. They are illustrated by example agents which can easily be understood and modified by the users. The framework has been successfully used and tested at different courses where the participants needed only few hours to understand the usage of the framework and to develop own agents for different tasks.