RHS simulator for robotic cognitive systems

The consolidation of the social robotics area requires the availability of a reference environment to develop, evaluate and compare the performance of the cognitive modeling controlling the robotic agent. The elaboration of a real reference environment involves high cost facilities for most of the research labs. As an alternative approach, this paper presents a cognitive system simulator named “Robot House Simulator” (RHS). The RHS provides an environment where a robot and a human character can interact socially with increasing levels of cognitive processing. An unprecedented feature of this simulator is to offer information about all the senses of the robot, actually only the sense of sight has been considered in the existing simulators. In its first version, this simulator has as a scenario one residence containing a living room and a kitchen. The results obtained show its functionalities considering different robot's senses.