NAO robot simulation for service robotics purposes

Humanoids playing soccer are required to solve a great variety of tasks: from perception to body motion, from decision making to team coordination. On the other hand, results from this community are sometimes underestimated or unexploited because of the dedicated software developed. In particular simulators are often designed for a specific robotics platform or in some other cases the integration with existing software and frameworks is hard to implement and time consuming. In this paper we introduce a novel virtual model to simulate the humanoid robot Aldebaran NAO. The URDF (Unified Robot Description Format) standard has been followed in order to maintain the model as general purpose as possible. Related plug-ins to make it works in Gazebo and V-REP simulation environments were also developed in order to test the model under ROS (Robot Operating System), a very common robotics framework.