[Robotics] Blender and academic world

[Damien Marchal]

Hi,

I'm a research engineer working at the IRCICA-CNRS specialized on 
virtual reality
things. At  IRCICA we have some good haptic devices
(Phantoms) as well as room with art-tracks: 
http://www2.lifl.fr/pirvi/pirvi_salleRV.php
and of courses touchtables. I initiated the use of blender in my 
institute; and I we have just
released a specific version of blender supporting the TUIO procol in the 
gameengine.
You can have look in this news:
http://www.blendernation.com/2009/04/11/blendertuio-blender-multi-touch-screen/

For the moment this blenderTUIO is capable of receiving sensor data and 
inject them in the
gameengine. Initially we tried to use python scripts but it was too slow 
so we made a direct support
in C++ that is now working nicely. Currently the data are only from the 
physical sensors mapped to
gameengine sensors, so we can update object position/orientation based 
on the sensors data. A
possible next step could be to send force/torque from the gameengine to 
physical actuator
(in my case a Phantom). I also have plan to add richer info we got from 
the sensors, for example
we have a lot of camera from which we get 2d polygonal model, and I 
would like to
inject that in the gameengine (in my case for VR interaction).


Few days ago I noticed you project on blendernation.
http://www.blendernation.com/2009/04/10/blender-for-robotics-is-shaping-up/

I was wondering the amount of connections between our respective work, 
and how much from
each other we can reuse and maybe collaborate. If you are going to add 
support at c++ layer (
is this a direction you want to go?)  maybe it could make sense to 
define a shared interface for all
kind of external sensors and actuators as well as their python exposure 
(normalized naming) ?

I would dream of a demo, based on blender, in which a set of real robots 
are navigating in the building,
with some of them controlled from our VR room using the art-tracks 
gloves and touchtable... so I will follow
the blender-robotics page news with a lot of care.

Have fun and best regards,
Damien.
PS: I'm not sure we have the same definition for word like sensors 
etc... :), please correct me if this is not the case.