Robots and simulated environments-first steps towards virtual robotics

The context of the paper is the design of an appropriate working environment for learning robots. The authors are interested in robots which are able to structure incoming sensor data on the basis of internal reference schemes and robot tasks. For efficiency reasons, they want to perform the learning cycles in simulated environments explored by the robot. The authors outline how advanced visualization and interaction techniques as developed in the field of virtual reality could be employed to study the development and properties of the internal data of a semi-autonomous robot, as well as the learning process itself.<>