Webots Newsletter [November 2003]

o Webots in Robotica

The scientific journal Robotica (Cambridge University Press) is featuring a
nice paper entitled "Swarm robotics odor localization: Off-line optimization
and validation with real robots" by Adam T. Hayes, Alcherio Martinoli and
Rodney M. Goodman. This paper presents an investigation of odor localization
by groups of autonomous mobile robots using principles of Swarm
Intelligence.
The authors used Webots to optimize the performance of the group of robots
with reinforcement learning. Robotica, Volume 21, Issue 04. August 2003.
pp427-441
http://journals.cambridge.org/bin/bladerunner?REQUNIQ=1069833939&REQSESS=5356821\
&118000REQEVENT=&REQINT1=179389&REQAUTH=0

o Webots in Micro & Robots

Patrick Pollet wrote an article in the upcoming December issue of
"Micro & Robot" french hobbyist magazine presenting the uPoBot robot and
Webots. The uPoBot robot looks like the kiki robot provided within the
Webots package, execept that uPoBot has 3 distance sensors instead of 2.
It will be a nice exercice for the reader to adapt the simulated kiki
model to
match the uPoBot robot described in the article.
http://www.electroniquepratique.com/

o New swiss competitors in the Judo contest

We currently have 28 teams engaged in the simulated humanoid robot judo
contest. Many of them came recently from the Biologically Inspired
Artificial
Intelligence Course given at the Computer Science department of the
University
of Zurich by Prof. Auke Jan Ijspeert. It seems that the robots are still
progressing every day with many updates and interesting new behaviors.
For the
time being, Coyote is still #1 with a very agressive strategy and an
efficient
stand up algorithm.
http://birg.epfl.ch/page33771.html
http://cyberboticspc1.epfl.ch/contest/index.php


o Webots 4.0.17 released today

This new version of Webots introduces several important bug fixes.
The Mac OS X version is better supported. You can download this
new version from the usual place:
http://www.cyberbotics.com/products/webots/download.html


--
-Olivier Michel
http://www.cyberbotics.com
Phone/Fax: +41 21 693 8624