Journal of Control, Automation and Electrical Systems https://doi.org/10.1007/s40313-018-0390-y Humanoid Robot Framework for Research on Cognitive Robotics Danilo H. Perico 1 · Thiago P. D. Homem 1,2 · Aislan C. Almeida 1 · Isaac J. Silva 1 · Claudio O. Vilão Jr. 1 · Vinicius N. Ferreira 1 · Reinaldo A. C. Bianchi 1 Received: 29 November 2017 / Revised: 26 March 2018 / Accepted: 1 May 2018 © Brazilian Society for Automatics–SBA 2018 Abstract This paper presents a humanoid robot framework, composed of a simulator and a telemetry interface. The framework is based on the Cross Architecture, and it is developed aiming for the RoboCup Soccer Humanoid League domain. A simulator is an important tool for testing cognitive algorithms without handling issues of real robots; furthermore, a simulator is extremely useful for allowing reproducibility of any developed algorithm, even if there is no robot available. The proposed simulator allows an easy transfer of the algorithms developed in the simulator to real robots, as long as it uses the Cross Architecture as its software architecture. Then, in order to evaluate the cognitive algorithms in real robots, a telemetry interface is proposed. From this interface, it is possible to monitor any variable in the robot’s shared memory. The framework is open source and has low computational cost. Experiments were conducted in order to analyze both, simulator and telemetry interface. Experiments performed with the simulator aim to validate the high-level strategy development and the portability to a real robot, while experiments with telemetry interface aim to evaluate the robot behavior using, as input, the information received from the shared memory passed by all processes. The results show that the simulator can be used to test and develop new algorithms, while the telemetry can be used to monitor the robot, thus validating the framework for this domain. Keywords Humanoid robot framework · Cognitive robotics · Robot simulator and telemetry 1 Introduction The humanoid robot framework proposed on this work is based on the Cross Architecture (Perico et al. 2014a, b). The Cross Architecture is a software architecture composed by independent modules, that was proposed in order to allow a humanoid robot, equipped with a computer, to perform sev- eral concurrent tasks, including servomotor control, decision, localization, vision and so on. Several modules of the Cross Architecture are dedicated to the development of cognitive algorithms, i.e., algorithms aimed at building intelligent robots, where the input–output behavior of the robot matches corresponding human behav- ior (Russell and Norvig 2010). Nevertheless, one of the main problems of developing cognitive algorithms in real B Danilo H. Perico dperico@fei.edu.br Thiago P. D. Homem thiagohomem@ifsp.edu.br 1 Centro Universitário FEI, São Bernardo do Campo, SP, Brazil 2 Instituto Federal de São Paulo, São Paulo, SP, Brazil humanoid robots is the physical issues, such as backlashes, broken parts, bad connections. Another problem of devel- oping cognitive algorithms in unique humanoid robots, i.e., those ones that are not standard, is the lack of reproducibility of any proposed code. Thereby, a simulator becomes an important tool for debug- ging and testing high-level algorithms without the need of dealing with real robot problems. Furthermore, a simulator allows the reproducibility of any proposed algorithm, even if there is no real robot available. The usage of simulators also allows the performance of a large number of experiments, without the risk of damaging robots. There are already several kinds of robot simulators avail- able, such as Gazebo (2016), Webots (2016), Virtual robot experimentation platform (2016) and RoboCup Soccer 3D (2017). However, those 3D simulators often have high com- putational cost and they need to have the specific desired robot model, which is not always available by default. In the existing 2D simulators, such as the RoboCup Soccer 2D (2017), some of the difficulties arise from the integration of the Cross Architecture. Beyond that, it is not an easy task to 123