A dynamic simulation environment that has been used for the six-legged robot Hector. The simulation engine is based on ODE (Open Dynamics Engine) and simply uses the accompanying visualization from ODE (drawstuff). It has been developed as part of the doctoral thesis by Jan Paskarbeit (see Paskarbeit, 2017).

The robot simulator implements a generic simulation environment and a communication protocol to connect controller and simulator (or the real robot) is realized (BioFlexBus, see Schneider et al, 2011).

This simulator has been extensively used for simulation of biologically-inspired locomotion control: research from stick insect walking (see Schilling et al., 2013a) has been applied on the six-legged robot Hector (see Schilling and Cruse, 2017, Schilling et al., 2013b, and Paskarbeit et al., 2015).

For more details on the robot Hector see Schneider et al., 2014.

Loading and running the motor controller has been realized in python and is published TODO_GIT.

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The simulation environment has been developed under linux and is based on ODE. It has been developed starting in 2009, initially using ODE version 0.11.

In order to run the simulation environment (for Mac OS X see below):

• Clone/download the git repository.
• Install the required dependencies: source InstallDependencies.sh
• You need libode (Open Dynamics Engine) – if it is not installed on your machine: under SharedLibraries use: source DownloadLatestOde.sh
• We are using an older version of boost - newer versions (>= 1.7) seem to have broken pointers, therefore you have to switch to an older version.
• In the RobotSim folder simply call: make
• Start the simulator window: ./RobotSim

Loading a robot definition and running the motor controller (in our case realized in python3) is, for example, started from the py_neuro_walknet package and maintained in a separate repository.

The simulation environment has been adapted to work under Mac OS X as well – but this required some workarounds:

• Clone/download the git repository.
• Try to install the required dependencies (this might lead to errors): source InstallDependencies.sh
• Install libode – for Mac OS X version 0.13 was the last we got running with the simulator. You should download libode version 0.13 from sourceforge. Afterwards put the downloaded library folder simply in the SharedLibraries folder (and rename it to “ode”; you don't have to build or configure it, this will be called from inside the make step for the robot simulator).
• In the RobotSim folder simply call: make
• Start the simulator window: ./RobotSim (under Mac: you are required to install and start XQuartz before)

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The repository consists of different parts:

• BioFlexBusProtocolXmls, BioFlexServer, FlexLoaderTcp - holds definitions of BioFlexBus protocol and implements the server for the protocol.
• CommunicationInterface - establishes a connection towards the controller.
• RobotSim - the robot simulation environment as such.

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• Paskarbeit, J. (2017). Consider the robot - Abstraction of bioinspired leg coordination and its application to a hexapod robot under consideration of technical constraints. Bielefeld: Universität Bielefeld.
• Paskarbeit, J., Schilling, M., Schmitz, J., & Schneider, A. (2015). Obstacle crossing of a real, compliant robot based on local evasion movements and averaging of stance heights using singular value decomposition. Proceedings IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2015, 3140-3145. doi:10.1109/ICRA.2015.7139631
• Schilling, M., & Cruse, H. (2017). ReaCog, a Minimal Cognitive Controller Based on Recruitment of Reactive Systems. Frontiers in Neurorobotics, 11, 3. doi:10.3389/fnbot.2017.00003
• Schilling, M., Hoinville, T., Schmitz, J., & Cruse, H. (2013a). Walknet, a bio-inspired controller for hexapod walking. Biological Cybernetics, 107(4), 397-419. doi:10.1007/s00422-013-0563-5
• Schilling, M., Paskarbeit, J., Hoinville, T., Hüffmeier, A., Schneider, A., Schmitz, J., & Cruse, H. (2013b). A hexapod walker using a heterarchical architecture for action selection. Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience, 7, 126. doi:10.3389/fncom.2013.00126
• Schneider, A., Paskarbeit, J., Schilling, M., & Schmitz, J. (2014). HECTOR, a bio-inspired and compliant hexapod robot. Proceedings of the 3rd Conference on Biomimetics and Biohybrid Systems, Living Machines 2014, 427-430.
• Schneider, A., Paskarbeit, J., Schäffersmann, M., & Schmitz, J. (2011). Biomechatronics for Embodied Intelligence of an Insectoid Robot. Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Intelligent Robotics and Applications (ICIRA 2011), 1-11. Springer. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-25489-5_1