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Simulation has become an essential part in the development process of autonomous robotic systems. In the domain of robotics, developers often are confronted with problems like noisy sensor data, hardware malfunctions and scarce or temporarily inoperable hardware resources. A solution to most of the problems can be given by tools which allow the simulation of the application scenario in varying degrees of abstraction and the suppression of unwanted features of the domain (like e.g. sensor noise). The RoboCup scenario of autonomous mobile robots playing soccer is one such domain where the above mentioned problems typically arise. In this work we will present a flexible simulation platform for the RoboCup F2000 league developed as a joint open source project by the universities of Freiburg [14] and Stuttgart [8] which achieves a maximum degree of modularity by a plugin based architecture and allows teams to easily develop and share software modules for the simulation of different sensors, kinematics and even complete player behaviors. Moreover we show how plugins can be utilized to implement benchmark tasks for multi robot learning and give an example that demonstrates how the generic plugin approach can be extended towards the implementation of hardware independent algorithms for robot localization.

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