Simulator platform that enables social interaction simulation — SIGVerse: SocioIntelliGenesis simulator

Understanding mechanisms of intelligence of human beings and animals is one of the most important approaches to develop intelligent robot systems. Since the mechanisms of such real-life intelligent systems are so complex, physical interactions between agents and their environment and the social interactions between agents should be considered. Comprehension and knowledge in many peripheral fields such as cognitive science, developmental psychology, brain science, evolutionary biology, and robotics is also required. Discussions from an interdisciplinary aspect are very important for implementing this approach, but such collaborative research is time-consuming and labor-intensive, and it is difficult to obtain fruitful results from such research because the basis of experiments is very different in each research field. In the social science field, for example, several multi-agent simulation systems have been proposed for modeling factors such as social interactions and language evolution, whereas robotics researchers often use dynamics and sensor simulators. However, there is no integrated system that uses both physical simulations and social communication simulations. Therefore, we developed a simulator environment called SIGVerse that combines dynamics, perception, and communication simulations for synthetic approaches to research into the genesis of social intelligence. In this paper, we introduce SIGVerse, its example application and perspectives.