[Robotics] Performance test with realistic robot model

[Benoit Bolsee]

Hi,

I received from the KUL a nice robot model and I tested it with iTaSC.
You can see the result here: http://vimeo.com/5857397

It allowed me to test the performance of iTaSC compared to the old
solver. The difference is amazing! iTaSC is able to operate this robot
in real time at 25 fps using 10% of one CPU core (E8400 @ 3GHz). This
percentage does not include the time spent on graphic (4%). In this test
iTaSC computes 100 iterations per second.

The exact same test but using the old solver uses 99% of one CPU core
and runs at 4.4fps. This means that iTaSC is about 56 times faster than
the old solver and produces much more coherent results. This is without
SSE optimization (significant performance gain can be expected from
Eigen2 template library when SSE optimizations are enabled).

When I enable the auto step algorithm, the performance doubles but the
movements are slightly less stable.  

The iTaSC algorithm is available in the itasc branch (based on blender
2.5) and tests builds are available at graphicall.org

Regards,
Benoit

P.S. Florian, can you add this video to the Blender and Robotics group
in Vimeo. I couldn't find how to do it.