A software toolset for quick humanoid motion prototyping

When dealing with humanoid robot simulations, researchers must usually choose between two extreme options. One options consists of very low level libraries like Open Dynamics Engine (ODE) that provide basic functionalities the simulation of physical bodies. The other option consist in very articulated development environments like Microsoft Robotics Studio or a complete simulation of soccer matches like SimsPark. A plenty of other open source software are available, but none of them seems to spread among the researchers.In fact on the one hand these projects provide many functionalities not available to the basic physical simulation libraries that constitute their core. On the other hand, however, the API are usually complex to use and reaching the knowledge necessary for modifying their code and adding functionalities requires much time. Conversely, often simulations are employed for fast prototyping and testing of new algorithms, so instead of spending time in learning how to use existing projects most researches resort to basic libraries like ODE and implement of layer of abstraction to model humanoid robots. We therefore propose a simple library that abstracts the level of simulations of rigid bodies to the simulation of humanoid robots, providing functionalities for modeling, visualization and basic interaction as well as a set of tools for the realization of robot motions. In the development we paid particular care in keeping the code as simple as possible to allow users to easily understand and modify the code itself for fast prototyping, without the need to implement parts of the program usually reimplemented by every researcher.