Using a Virtual World to Design a Simulation Platform for Vision and Robotic Systems

Virtual worlds are increasingly being used in research and development to provide simulation platforms for testing, debugging and validating proof-of-concepts, as they offer a significant savings in cost: time and other resources. This paper describes the design or a real-time open-source 3D simulation platform based on a commercially available Half Life 2 game engine. It is primarily aimed towards research in mobile robotics, in-game characters manipulation, surveillance related vision application, and high quality synthetic video generation. Along with the illustrations of the platform and the analysis of algorithms, this paper also provides a comprehensive tutorial in developing similar tools for researchers, enthusiasts and commercialists to pursue their interests in creating and applying such tools to their own objectives.