Biorobotics Laboratory BioRob

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by Jean-Philippe Egger

Supervisor: Olivier Michel
Director: Prof. Auke Jan Ijspeert
Semester Project Summer 2004

Introduction

Since 1998 Cyberbotics Ltd., a leading company in 3D mobile robot simulation, organizes robot simulation contests on its web site. Since 2002 Cyberbotics Ltd. works in close collaboration with the Biologically Inspired Robotics Group (BIRG) of the Ecole Polytechnique fédéral de Lausanne (EPFL). In 2003 the International Robot Judo Contest was created, witch successfully attracted hundreds of passionate programmers of humanoid Robots from all around the world. The goal of the competition was to share the passion and knowledge about robot controllers in a competitive and amusing environment. In this way, challenging scientific work was turned into a much more enjoyable and comparable competition. The environment was produced by Cyberbotics' commercial physics-based robot simulation software. The controllers were programmed in Java, uploaded to the personal account, and every weekday at 14h00 Central European Time the competition was started with the actual controllers. The competition finished the 5th May 2004 with the happy winner receiving a brand new Hemisson robot combined with the Webots PRO package.

Project Goals

The success of the 2003 / 2004 competition edition and the continuous ambition to propagate their enthusiasm and knowledge about robotics, gave Cyberbotics and BIRG the decisive motivation to go on. Together they decided to reengage their efforts and resources into a new and ameliorated humanoid robot wrestling competition. Therefore, a complete analysis of the overall user-friendliness and documentation of the actual competition was needed. The primary aims of this project were: