An application interface for UCHILSIM and the arrival of new challenges

Abstract

UCHILSIM is a robot simulator recently introduced in the RoboCup Four Legged League. A main attractive of the simulator is the possibility of reproducing with accuracy the dynamical behavior of AIBO(1) robots as well as providing good graphical representations of their surroundings on a soccer scenario. Learning over virtual environments can be performed with successful transfers of resulting behaviors to real environments. Previous version of the simulator had a major drawback: Only the UChile1 team could make use of it since the developed system had high dependency on the team code. In this paper we present results of a development work which was envisioned on the first presentation of UCHILSIM; an application interface for allowing any OPEN-R software code to be directly used over the UCHILSIM simulator. The possibility of having this kind of tool opens a great field of developments and challenges since more people will develop OPEN-R software, even without having the robotic hardware but the simulator. Other recent improvements on our simulator are briefly presented here as well.