The simulator has been disabled for the foreseeable future as yours truly has graduated!

GroceryWorld is an Artificial Intelligence testbed for the Shopper project. Shopper is an artificial agent which (like people) shops in a store. The real difference is that the environment for Shopper is a simulation. The version of GroceryWorld you will see is a water-downed version of what Shopper actually senses in the "real" simulator.

If you know what "Artificial Intelligence" means, you can skip to the next section. Artificial Intelligence (AI) seeks to understand the nature of intelligence: the information and computational processes underlying complex behavior. My own work focuses on building intelligent robots to function in everyday environments. In order to achieve intelligent behavior, I work on these traditional subject areas:

• Vision/Perception - Making the robot "see" the various items in the store.
• Planning - Figure out what to do at any one moment; Using general knowledge of grocery stores; Finding items in an unfamiliar store; Controlling perception.
• Navigation - Progressively more complex behavior as Shopper adapts and learns the structure of a store.

• A real store for experiments is unavailable on a regular basis.
• The simulator allows me to ignore problems like wheel slippage, hardware failures, etc., and instead concentrate on a different set of problems.

This simulator gives images as if you were actually there. It's limited in that you can only face four directions, but you can move around the store. In total, the laserdisc which holds all the images can output about 75,000 images of the store.

Since each aisle was filmed in four directions, we basically have two types of views: down an aisle and shelf items.

Other than the images, the simulator provides sonar and sign information. The sonar is used by Shopper to know where it can move. Sign information is reproduced from the store signs (the views don't include ceiling shots). These two pieces of additional information aren't incorporated into the web version.

For the web version of this simulator, you'll be presented with an image of the store from where you're standing. Initially you'll be standing at the entrance to the store. From there, you can click on the image to move around. You can:

Move forward (backward) - Take one step ahead (back)

Turn right (left) - Turn your body to the right (left)

Shift right (left) - Move your body to the right (left)

There's also some additional options for color/greyscale, help text on/off, and image size preferences. I also added a stepping size option which allows you to move around really fast (or really slow).

Bear in mind that this simulator relies on a laserdisc player which may sometimes be slow in accessing images. Repeatedly stopping and clicking won't get you anywhere. Also, the simulator is used to feed my programs images, so sometimes there can be an additional delay.

Enter store now

If you'd like to know more details about the simulator you can check out the GroceryWorld page.
If you'd like read more about the research involved you can check out the Shopper page.

This work is supported in part by Office of Naval Research grant number N00014-91-J-1185.

Last modified 07 November 1997