Written by Francesco Mondada
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Thursday, 20 January 2011 08:15 |
V-REP - the Virtual Robot Experimentation Platform - now includes a simulation model of the e-puck robot. The user can easily modify, adjust or rewrite the example control code to fit his/her own needs. The user can also easily compose complex simulation scenes by dragging-and-dropping new models or robots into the scene, allowing the e-puck to also interact with other robots, furniture, or custom-made models.
V-REP is a 3D robot simulator based on a distributed control architecture: control programs (or scripts) can be directly attached to scene objects and run simultaneously in a threaded or non-threaded fashion. This makes V-REP very versatile and ideal for multi-robot applications, and allows users to model robotic systems in a similar fashion as in reality - where control is most of the time also distributed.
Complex simulation can be created by making use of the various supported functionality, including:
- 2 physics engines support (Bullet and ODE) - Full forward/inverse kinematics solver (handles any type of mechanism) - Collision detection calculations - Minimum distance calculations (mesh-mesh distance) - Path planning (holonomic tasks in 2-6 dimensions and non-holonomic tasks for car-like vehicles) - Proximity sensor simulation (exact minimum distance calculation within a customizable detection volume) - Camera-like sensor simulation (fully customizable, with image processing capabilities) - Various integrated edit modes (mesh edit modes, path edit mode, and custom UI edit mode) - CAD data import/export (DXF, OBJ, 3DS or STL) - Simulation data recording, graphing and export - Various extension mechanisms (through scripts, plugins or a custom client application)
V-REP has various prices and licensing schemes. Students can use V-REP on their private computer free of charge.
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Last Updated on Thursday, 20 January 2011 08:21 |