XPERSim: A Simulator for Robot Learning by Experimentation

Abstract

In this paper, we present XPERSim, a 3D simulator built on top of open source components that enables users to quickly and easily construct an accurate and photo-realistic simulation for robots of arbitrary morphology and their environments. 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 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 used for robotic learning by experimentation, XPERSIF, and the use of the scene-oriented nature of the Ogre engine, the simulation is distributed to numerous users that include researchers and robotic components, thus enabling simultaneous, quasi-realtime observation of the multiple-camera simulations.

The work described in this article has been partially funded by the European Commission’s Sixth Framework Programme under contract no. 029427 as part of the Specific Targeted Research Project XPERO (“Robotic Learning by Experimentation”). The authors thank Keyan Zahedi, Ronny Hartanto, Karl-Heinz Sylla and Paul Plöger for their guidance and the researchers in the XPERO project for their feedback and support.The authors gratefully acknowledge the reviewers’ comments.