Summary
This paper describes Rat’s Life: a complete cognitive robotics benchmark that was carefully designed to be easily reproducible in a research lab with limited resources. It relies on two e-puck robots, some LEGO bricks and the Webots robot simulation software. This benchmark is a survival game where two robots compete against each other for resources in an unknown maze. Like the rats in cognitive animal experimentation, the e-puck robots look for feeders which allow them to live longer than their opponent. Once a feeder is reached by a robot, the robot draws energy from it and the feeder becomes unavailable for a while. Hence, the robot has to further explore the maze, searching for other feeders while remembering the way back to the first ones. This allows them to be able to refuel easily again and again and hopefully live longer than their opponent. ...
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Baltes, J.: A benchmark suite for mobile robots. In: IROS 2000 conference proceeding, vol. 2, pp. 1101–1106 (2000)
Serri, A.: A Lego robot for experimental benchmarking of robust exploration algorithms. Circuits and Systems 3, 163–166 (2004)
Eaton, M., Collins, J.J., Sheehan, L.: Toward a benchmarking framework for research into bio-inspired hardware-software artefacts. In: Artificial Life and Robotics, Japan, March 2001, vol. 5(1), pp. 40–45. Springer, Heidelberg (2001)
Collins, J.J., Eaton, M., Mansfield, M., Haskett, D., O’Sullivan, S.: Developing a benchmarking framework for map building paradigms. In: Proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Artificial Life and Robotics, Oita, Japan, January 2004, pp. 614–617 (2004)
Kitano, H., Asada, M., Kuniyoshi, Y., et al.: RoboCup: the robot world cup initiative. In: IJCAI-95 workshop on entertainment and AI/ALife (1995)
Michel, O.: Webots: Professional Mobile Robot Simulation. Journal of Advanced Robotics Systems 1(1), 39–42 (2004), http://www.ars-journal.com/International-Journal-of-Advanced-Robotic-Systems/Volume-1/39-42.pdf
Dillmann, R.: Benchmarks for Robotics Research. EURON (April 2004), http://www.cas.kth.se/euron/eurondeliverables/ka1-10-benchmarking.pdf
Rat’s Life contest, http://www.ratslife.org
Micromouse contest, http://www.micromouseinfo.com
FIRST Robotics competition, http://www.usfirst.org
Eurobot Robotics competition, http://www.eurobot.org
ROBOlympics, http://www.robolympics.net
AAAI Robot Competition and exhibition, http://palantir.cs.colby.edu/aaai07
The Federation of International Robot-soccer Association (FIRA), http://www.fira.net
DARPA Grand Challenge, http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge
European Land-Robot Trial ELROB, http://www.elrob.org/
EURON Benchmarking Activities, http://www.euron.org/activities/benchmarks/index.html
LEGO factory, http://factory.lego.com
Cyberbotics Ltd, http://www.cyberbotics.com
e-puck web site, http://www.e-puck.org
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Michel, O., Rohrer, F., Bourquin, Y. (2008). Rat’s Life: A Cognitive Robotics Benchmark. In: Bruyninckx, H., Přeučil, L., Kulich, M. (eds) European Robotics Symposium 2008. Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics, vol 44. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-78317-6_23
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-78317-6_23
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-78315-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-78317-6
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)