[Robotics] YARP + Blender

[Séverin Lemaignan]

Hello!

Thanks for your interest and valuable offer :-)

We (at LAAS) are definitely looking forward having YARP as a door to the 
outside world for the simulator. We already use it in several European 
projects and it's something we will need in Blender as well.

Since YARP does have complete Python bindings, it shouldn't be very 
complicated to have quickly a first prototype of a /blender_simu port 
outputing the position of a cube, for instance, from the GameEngine.

The second step is probably to build a (relatively) simple mobile robot 
(for instance 4 wheels, differential steering, a laser scanner, a 
camera, a localisation device) controlled by an external YARP application.

A third step could be the set up of a more complex robot (with complete 
kinematics, like a humanoid -> iCub).

If you want to work on some prototypes and release some sample scripts, 
or just add some pointers to useful resources on how to set up a YARP 
environment with Blender, I created an empty page on the Wiki:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Robotics:YARP

One of the things I would like to implement quickly is a package 
management system integrated into Blender to store various Python 
scripts & actuators/sensors/models useful for robotics and easily 
reusable by everyone.

Scripts for YARP, ROS or other middlewares would be some of the base 
packages required to communicate with the simulator.

Cheers,
Séverin


Paul Fitzpatrick a écrit :
> 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
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Robotics mailing list
> Robotics at blender.org
> http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/robotics
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