Erebus & CoppeliaSim Simplus the new Robocup Junior Rescue Simulation platform

This project is dedicated to the new Rescue simulation environment for Robocupers from Juniors and is aimed to be a bridge from Robocup Junior Rescue to Robocup Major Rescue competitions, so that a kid could start with it (even by using Scratch to move a simulated robot) and gradually be introduced with more complex problems and languages (e.g. implementing object detection and SLAM by ROS).

The Robocup Virtual Rescue robot technical committee members presented a poster called “A proposal on more advanced Robot Rescue Simulation challenges for Robotics Education” at Robocup symposium 2019 alongside a Workshop On Educational Robotics-WEROB 2019. In the poster, the requirements of a platform to be used as bridge to filling the gap between RoboCup Junior Rescue and Virtual Rescue Robot competition for such a development are defined as follows:

• Being free and fully accessible to students to use,
• Ease of installation even on low-spec PCs,
• Interface that is intuitive to use.
• The ability to serve from fundamentals to higher complexity concepts,
• Easy transition to research-based platforms from educational-focused platform

The poster attracted the Robocup Trustees attention and was selected for the Robocup Federation Funding –RCF support funding. Thus, the team of Robocup Virtual Robot League started to implement the platform.

After lots of investigations, the Simplus team decided to work based on CoppeliaSim from the three selected platforms: CoppeliaSim, Webot, and Gazebo. It should be mentioned that CoppeliaSim provides a free license for educational purposes and accepts seven programming languages.

Why Simplus?

As you might see, the Simplus logo consists of two main parts a robot and a plus(+) sign. The robot represents the simulation part, and the plus(+) sign is inspired by International Committee of the Red Cross ( The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is an impartial, neutral and independent organization whose exclusively humanitarian mission is to protect the lives and dignity of victims of war and internal violence and to provide them with assistance. )

what is CoppeliaSim?

The Simplus platform is based on a V-rep which is now known as CoppeliaSim. CoppeliaSim is one of the most versatile and powerful robot simulation platforms available. It is used for fast algorithm development, factory automation simulations, fast prototyping and verification, robotics related education, remote monitoring, safety double-checking, as a digital twin, and much more.

How to Get Started With The New Platform?

We reassure you that it is one of the easiest things to get done in the coding world, just go through the steps in the tutorials which can be found here. It would be as easy as several clicks in any OSs ( win, mac, & ubuntu).

what is Erebus (Erebos)?

There are two definitions for Erebus:

1. it was one of the primeval goddesses in Greek mythology, born out of the primeval void, Chaos. It was the personification of the deep darkness and shadows. Erebus was the brother of Gaea (earth), Tartarus (underworld), Eros (love), and Nyx (night).
2. it is a place of darkness in the underworld on the way to Hades.

Erebus Simulation platform

Another team of Robocup Committee members is also developing a platform for Robocup Junior Rescue which is based on the webot, and the platform is named Erebus.

In Erebus, the P3dx robot model is used as the robot model. further details on Erebus will be added to this page soon.