A Simulation Framework for Human-Robot Interaction

The development of human-robot interaction scenarios is a strongly situation-dependent as well as an extremely dynamic task. Humans interacting with the robot directly react on observed stimuli; changes in the environment are not avoidable. Therefore it is impossible to test and verify interaction scenarios in real environments in a repeatable manner. In this paper, we propose a robot development framework that is able to simulate all required modules of the robot, its sensor system as well as its environment including persons. The simulation is able to represent all actuators of a humanoid robot like body, head and arm movements as well as facial expression. Besides the simulation of actuators all sensors are modeled directly in the framework. It is possible to integrate cameras, microphones, distance sensors, and RFID tags and reader. These sensors provide the input for the robot control system based on the environmental situation including static elements like furniture and walls as well as movable objects like humans. The implementation of human movements is based on the H-Anim standard and a modeling tool which enables the user to record and integrate self-designed motions.