During my long experience at Pal Robotics developing humanoid robots, I learned just how much a good simulator can help speed up the development and maintenance processes of robot building. To my surprise, however, I recently discovered that lots of robotics companies don’t use a simulator for this purpose. In this post I’ll share with you the key reasons why you should be using a simulator for your robot development.

The Robot Race to Hawaii is a robotics contest where participants program a humanoid Nao robot to run a 10-meter race in the shortest time possible. The whole competition is run in a Webots simulation inside The Construct hosting platform. Participants need only a computer equipped with web browser to participate, and are not required to download any applications. There is no cost to enter.

The Construct is a Barcelona based startup created to simplify the simulation of robots. The goal is to allow anybody to simulate complex robots and environments with minimal knowledge, without having to install or maintain anything in their computers, and without having to build the simulations from scratch.

OSRF has developed two new Gazebo plugins.

Robots are expensive and they usually depend on batteries. What if you want to run an experiment with 100 robots, running for 10 hours?

Robots are expensive, and they are also hard to program. As a result, researchers often use software simulations instead of real robots to study human-robot interaction. But do people interact with simulated robots in the same way they would with real robots? 

CloudSim-Ed from OSRF.

During her Gnome Outreach Program for Women internship with OSRF, Ana Marian Pedro worked on CloudSim-Ed a prototype for a massive open online robotics course built with Google CourseBuilder. The course offers simulation tasks and challenges created with CloudSim, Gazebo and ROS.

In the previous ROS 101 post, we showed how easy it is to get ROS going inside a virtual machine, publish topics and subscribe to them. If you haven’t had a chance to check the out all the previous ROS 101 tutorials, you may want to do so before we go on. In this post, we’re going to drive a Husky in a virtual environment, and examine how ROS passes topics around.

Guest talk in the ShanghAI Lectures, 2009-12-17

In this guest lecture, Wenwei Yu from Chiba University, Japan, introduces his approach to assistive technology and talks about (simulation) experiments in human walking and reflexive responses.

This simulator can represent the complex pulsation of the heart. It is being developed by a group including members from National Cerebral and Cardiovascular Center and Riken.

Until now, simulating heart pulsation has required huge amounts of computing, done by supercomputers or offline. But this new system makes it possible to visualize heart pulsation on a notebook PC in real time, by applying computer graphics technology.