Validation of the dynamics of an humanoid robot in USARSim

Abstract

This paper describes a model to replicate the dynamics of a walking robot inside USARSim. USARSim is an existing 3D simulator based on the Unreal Engine, which provides facilities for good quality rendering, physics simulation, networking, a highly versatile scripting language and a powerful visual editor. To model the dynamics of a walking robot the balance of the robot in relation with the contact points of the body with the environment has to be calculated. To guarantee a fast frame rate several approximations in this calculation have to be tried, and the performance (both in dynamics and computational effort) is evaluated in a number of experiments. This extension is made and validated for the humanoid robot Nao. On this basis many other applications become possible. A validated simulation allows us to develop and to experiment with typical robotic tasks before they are tested on a real robot.