[Robotics] YARP + Blender

[Paul Fitzpatrick]

Hi all,

I was excited to see news of the formation of this list on 
BlenderNation.  On the wiki page, I noticed YARP mentioned as a desired 
middleware on the wish list.  I'm a YARP developer, and a big fan of 
Blender.  I'd be happy to lend a hand to anyone trying to interface to 
Blender via YARP.

There is a (non-Blender-based) humanoid robot simulator with a YARP 
network interface that might be a good starting point for understanding 
at least one way to interface to a simulator via YARP.  The code can be 
found in the repository of the RobotCub project:
  http://eris.liralab.it/iCub/dox/html/group__icub__Simulation.html
  http://www.robotcub.org/cvsweb/cvsweb.cgi/iCub/src/iCubSimulation/

I think Blender is a great candidate for a robot simulator.  Sometimes 
people forget that not only do you have to model the robot, you have to 
model the world around it.  And while the robot model may be relatively 
static for a given project, the desired world around it can change from 
experiment to experiment.  That means that it is just as important to 
invest in making good modeling tools as it is to getting the dynamics of 
the robot just right.  With Blender, the integrated modeling tools are 
there for free from the very beginning.

Cheers,
Paul