A Plugin-Based Architecture for Simulation in the F2000 League

Abstract

Simulation has become an essential part in the development process of autonomous robotic systems. In the domain of robotics, developers often are confronted with problems like noisy sensor data, hardware malfunctions and scarce or temporarily inoperable hardware resources. A solution to most of the problems can be given by tools which allow the simulation of the application scenario in varying degrees of abstraction and the suppression of unwanted features of the domain (like e.g. sensor noise). The RoboCup scenario of autonomous mobile robots playing soccer is one such domain where the above mentioned problems typically arise. In this work we will present a flexible simulation platform for the RoboCup F2000 league developed as a joint open source project by the universities of Freiburg [14] and Stuttgart [8] which achieves a maximum degree of modularity by a plugin based architecture and allows teams to easily develop and share software modules for the simulation of different sensors, kinematics and even complete player behaviors. Moreover we show how plugins can be utilized to implement benchmark tasks for multi robot learning and give an example that demonstrates how the generic plugin approach can be extended towards the implementation of hardware independent algorithms for robot localization.

RFID Technology-based Exploration and SLAM for Search And Rescue

“…The proposed method for RFID-based SLAM has extensively be tested with data generated by a simulator [7] and also on a real robot. The simulated robot explored three different building maps, a small map, normal map, and large map of the size 263m 2 , 589m 2 1240m 2 , respectively, while automatically distributing RFID tags in the environment.…”

Accurate robot simulation through system identification

“…These general purpose robot simulators, as well as models of specific robots, such as [10,11], have in common that they aim to be generally applicable, i.e. generic, and that they are therefore based on general assumptions about kinematics and dynamics of the robot and environment properties.…”

“…generic, and that they are therefore based on general assumptions about kinematics and dynamics of the robot and environment properties. The Webots simulation, for instance, defines mass distribution matrices for robot components, friction coefficients, bounciness etc in order to achieve a certain degree of fidelity, a RoboCup simulation is similar [11]. Player-Stage aims for "good enough fidelity" [5], where "good enough" is not defined (see discussion in section 3.2.1).…”