NaOISIS: A 3-D Behavioural Simulator for the NAO Humanoid Robot

We present NaOISIS, a three-dimensional behavioural simulator for the NAO humanoid robot, aimed at designing and testing physically plausible strategic behaviours for multi-agent soccer teams. NaOISIS brings together features from both physical three-dimensional simulators that model robot dynamics and interactions, and two-dimensional environments that are used to design sophisticated team coordination strategies, which are however difficult to implement in practice. To this end, the focus of our design has been on the accurate modeling of the simulated agents’ perceptual limitations and their compatibility with the corresponding capabilities of the real NAO robot. The simulator features presented in this paper suggest that NaOISIS can be used as a rapid prototyping tool for implementing behavioural algorithms for the NAO, and testing them in the context of matches between simulated agents.