ARENA and WOXBOT: first steps towards virtual world simulations

This paper reports new results of a project to build virtual worlds aimed at the graphic simulation of an arena where small mobile robots can perform requested tasks while behaving according to their own motivation and reasoning. Each robot is an intelligent agent that perceives the virtual environment via a simulated vision system and reacts to translating or rotating its body by driving its own wheels. The conception and specification of the robots and the environment are developed to create an open distributed object architecture that could serve as a testbed freely available and ready to use for testing theories in some computational areas such as evolutionary computation, artificial life, pattern recognition, artificial intelligence, cognitive neurosciences and distributed object architectures.