Abstract Far-field speech recognition for e.g. home automation or smart assistants has to cope with moving speakers in reverberant environments. Simulating stationary or even moving speakers in realistic environments enables to make speech processing technology more robust. This paper introduces an autonomous robot for recording a database of Room Impulse Responses (RIRs) at a high spatial resolution. This supports the creation of realistic simulation environments. These RIRs can be exploited to generate multi-channel speech mixtures of static or moving speakers for various applications. Here, we focus on the setup of the robot (construction and software) and the creation of such a database as well as the simulation of a moving speaker along a trajectory.