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Understanding the mechanism of intelligence in human beings and animals is one of the most important approaches to developing intelligent robot systems. Since the mechanisms of such real-life intelligent systems are so complex, such as the physical interactions between agents and their environment and the social interactions between agents, comprehension and knowledge in many peripheral fields such as cognitive science, developmental psychology, brain science, evolutionary biology, and robotics. Discussions from an interdisciplinary aspect are very important for implementing this approach, but such collaborative research is time-consuming and labor-intensive, and it is difficult to obtain fruitful results from such research because the basis of experiments is very different in each research field. In the social science field, for example, several multi-agent simulation systems have been proposed for modeling factors such as social interactions and language evolution, whereas robotics researchers often use dynamics and sensor simulators. However, there is no integrated system that uses both physical simulations and social communication simulations.
Therefore, we have been developing a simulator environment called SIGVerse, which is a simulator that combines dynamics, perception, and communication simulations for synthetic approaches to research into the genesis of social intelligence. In this paper, we introduce SIGVerse, its example application and perspectives.
Virtual world simulation is achieved using Unity.
Unity is a game engine with an integrated development environment.
Many VR devices can be used in Unity, which helps to reflect the real world human behavior in the virtual world.
Robots in the virtual world are controlled using ROS (Robot Operating System).
ROS is a software platform for robots and can control many real robots.
A real human (test subject) can log into the virtual world through general VR devices to interact with the virtual robot in the virtual world.
You can apply the original software, which is used to control the real robot based on ROS, to the virtual robot without any modification.
The following figure shows the system architecture of the SIGVerse.
Unity is executed on Windows and ROS runs on Ubuntu.
Unity and ROS are connected using rosbridge and sigverse_rosbrige.
Use rosbrige to send / receive commands and small data for operating the robot.
Use sigverse_rosbridge to send large data such as robot sensor data (RGB images, etc.) to ROS.
Since sigverse_rosbridge is in BSON format, it is possible to send and receive binary data efficiently.
The tutorial is here.