Evaluating a physics engine as an ingredient for physical reasoning

Authors:
Erik Weitnauer;Robert Haschke;Helge Ritter
Affiliations:
Bielefeld University, Research Institute for Cognition and Robotics, Bielefeld, Germany;Bielefeld University, Research Institute for Cognition and Robotics, Bielefeld, Germany;Bielefeld University, Research Institute for Cognition and Robotics, Bielefeld, Germany
Venue:
SIMPAR'10 Proceedings of the Second international conference on Simulation, modeling, and programming for autonomous robots
Year:
2010

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Abstract

Physics engines have been used in robotics research for a long time. Beside their traditional application as a substitute for real world interactions due to their higher speed, safety and flexibility, they have recently also been used for motion planning and high level action planning. We propose to further explore the idea of using a physics engine as means to give a robot a basic physical understanding of its environment. In this paper, as a preliminary step, we study, how accurately the process of pushing flat objects across a table with a robot arm can be predicted in a physics engine. We also present an approach to adapt the engines parameters to enhance the simulation accuracy.