XPERSim: A Simulator for Robot Learning by Experimentation

In this paper, we present XPERSim, a 3D simulator built on top of open source components that quickly and easily constructs an accurate and photo-realistic simulation, both visually and dynamically, for robots of arbitrary morphology and of the environment within which it functions. While many existing robot simulators provide a good dynamics simulation, they often lack the high quality visualization that is now possible with general-purpose hardware. XPERSim achieves such high quality visualization by using the Object-Oriented Graphics Rendering Engine 3D (Ogre) engine to render the simulation whose dynamics are calculated using the Open Dynamics Engine (ODE). Through XPERSim’s integration into a component-based software integration framework, XPERSIF, and the use of the scene-oriented nature of the Ogre engine, the simulation is distributed to numerous users, thus enabling simultaneous, quasi-realtime observation of the multiple-camera simula-