Distributed Computation Environments that Accelerate Humanoid Robotics Research and Applications -The HRP Virtual Platform Project-

摘要

The Humanoid Robot Project being supported by the MITI, Japan, started in the fall of 1998 and will end the first phase in March 2000. The mission of the phase is to set up the platforms to accelerate further developments of research and to induce the emergence of various practical applications. To meet the goal of mission three task forces were organized, namely, the Hardware Platform Taskforce, the Teleoperation Platform Taskforce, and the Virtual Platform Taskforce. In this paper, we report the development by the Virtual Platform Taskforce, and describe the networked computational environments that have been established and have just started its operation. The computational environments include the computational engine for dynamics simulation, the computation engine of geometric interference, the sensor signal simulator, the motion viewer, and the scheduler that controls communication between the modules distributed in the network. Using an internet web brawser one can execute one's own control programs for one's own models of humanoids, see their motions, and measure their sensor signals.