Simulated humanoid robots for e-learning

Abstract

Robots will change our life dramatically. People are interested to know more about Robotics and AI. Teaching has to regard these developments. While learning by doing has great advantages, experimenting with real robots is limited by the available resources: Complex hardware is costly, and it needs time and experience for setup and maintenance. Simulated robots can be used as alternative. Our RoboNewbie project is a basic framework for experimenting with simulated robots. It serves as an inspiration for beginners, and it provides room for many challenging experiments. The RoboNewbie agents run in the simulation environment of SimSpark RCSS, the official RoboCup 3D simulator, where the simulated robots are models of the humanoid Robot NAO of the French Company Aldebaran. Different example agents provide easily understandable interfaces to simulated sensors and effectors of the robot as well as simple control structures. The framework has been successfully used at different courses where the participants needed only few hours to understand the usage of the framework and to develop own agents for different tasks.