Humanoid Robot Framework for Research on Cognitive Robotics

Abstract

This paper presents a humanoid robot framework, composed of a simulator and a telemetry interface. The framework is based on the Cross Architecture, and it is developed aiming for the RoboCup Soccer Humanoid League domain. A simulator is an important tool for testing cognitive algorithms without handling issues of real robots; furthermore, a simulator is extremely useful for allowing reproducibility of any developed algorithm, even if there is no robot available. The proposed simulator allows an easy transfer of the algorithms developed in the simulator to real robots, as long as it uses the Cross Architecture as its software architecture. Then, in order to evaluate the cognitive algorithms in real robots, a telemetry interface is proposed. From this interface, it is possible to monitor any variable in the robot’s shared memory. The framework is open source and has low computational cost. Experiments were conducted in order to analyze both, simulator and telemetry interface. Experiments performed with the simulator aim to validate the high-level strategy development and the portability to a real robot, while experiments with telemetry interface aim to evaluate the robot behavior using, as input, the information received from the shared memory passed by all processes. The results show that the simulator can be used to test and develop new algorithms, while the telemetry can be used to monitor the robot, thus validating the framework for this domain.