Robot Simulation In addition to building robots and writing robot control software, I also develop robot simulation tools. I am currently developing ROSE, the Robot Simulation Environment, for the Evolvable Systems Group at NASA. We use it both as a platform to support basic research in robotics, such as research in visually-guided end-effector placement, and also as a the core of automated robot design and optimization tools based on evolutionary search algorithms.

About ROSE ROSE is a medium-fidelity robot simulation library based on a modified version of the Open Dynamics Engine articulated-body physics library. Its high-level abstraction layers make it easy to quickly assemble robots out of functional modules in a virtual world and evaluate their performance using various controllers. It is capable of highly visually realistic simulation, used for testing machine vision tools, and can also perform simplified simulations faster than real-time, improving the performance of automated design techniques.