This paper presents an approach for learning complex tasks on real robots, like walking or kicking in a humanoid soccer robot, profiting at most from the possibility to run simulations of a virtual model of the robot. This approach avoids to damage the real robot in the time consuming trials needed to learn a correct behavior and avoids to overfit the virtual robot model. The basic idea is to r...

At present, robot simulators have robust physics engine, high-quality graphics, convenient customer and graphical interfaces, that gives rich opportunities to substitute the real robot by its simulation model, providing the calculation of a robot locomotion by odometry and sensor data. This paper aims at describing a Gazebo simulation approach of simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) bas...

One of the major challenges facing evolutionary robotics is crossing the reality gap: How to transfer evolved controllers from simulated robots to real robots while maintaining the behavior observed in simulation. Most attempts to cross the reality gap have either applied massive amounts of noise to the simulation, or conducted most or all of the evolution onboard the physical robot, an approac...

To study how robots can work better with humans as a team, we have designed an agent-based online testbed that supports virtual simulation of domain-independent human-robot interaction. The simulation is implemented as an online game where humans and virtual robots work together in simulated scenarios. This testbed allows researchers to carry out human-robot interaction studies and gain better ...

A four-legged pneumatically actuated search and rescue robot is presented as a system with potentially enhanced versatility relative to existing rescue robots. The usage of fluid powered actuation, combined with tele-operation of the robot via an operator workstation, enables the twelve degree of freedom robot to better manipulate large objects. A simulation is developed to enable ease of desig...

Visualization is an important precondition for successful tele-operation of instructable mobile robots. Data connections with varying and limited bandwidth such as the Internet, however, prohibit the continuous transmission of video signals. In this paper we propose a predictive simulation technique which is designed to permit the reliable visualization of the robot’s actions over the Internet....

The pitfalls of naive robot simulations have been recognised for areas such as evolutionary robotics. It has been suggested that carefully validated ispell slides.tex simulations with a proper treatment of noise may overcome these problems. This paper reports the results of experiments intended to test some of these claims. A simulation was constructed of a two-wheeled Khepera robot with IR and...

The reality gap is the discrepancy between simulation and reality—the same behavioural algorithm results in different robot swarm behaviours in simulation and in reality (with real robots). In this paper, we study the effect of the reality gap on the psychophysiological reactions of humans interacting with a robot swarm. We compare the psychophysiological reactions of 28 participants interactin...

Developing and testing the key modules of autonomous humanoid soccer robots (e.g., for vision, localization, and behavior control) in software-in-the-loop (SIL) experiments, requires real-time simulation of the main motion and sensing properties. These include humanoid robot kinematics and dynamics, the interaction with the environment, and sensor simulation, especially the camera properties. T...