Solidworks Motion
 

I am in charge of CAD on my team, 5811 (The BONDS); I recently heard from one of our programmers that he has heard of teams using Solidworks motion to simulate running Java programs without a practice bot. I have extensive experience with Solidworks motion studies and simulation tools and haven't seen any of this capability other that manually imputing commands into Motion Studies which wouldn't show how the program actually worked.Does anyone know if this is true; and if so how to do it?

Re: Solidworks Motion
 

There are Simulators like autodesk synthesis. http://bxd.autodesk.com

But, none of them truly replace a practice robot for any task and should not be treated as a substitute. It's an eh way to test code bit that's about it.

Re: Solidworks Motion
 

Thanks Sperkowsky,
I will look into Autodesk Synthesis; Our team manly uses Solidworks - Is there a similar program for it?
I fully understand that it isn't a replacement for a practice robot, however as a young team we don't have the recourses for a practice robot and having this would help our programmers before the robot is built to have something to start testing coding with.

Re: Solidworks Motion
 

IIRC, at some point WPI was working on something for Gazebo, but I don't really know anything about it or if they are even still working on it.

Re: Solidworks Motion
 

From what I remember, it did use Gazebo, but it could only be simulated in Linux. It seemed to be more of a gimmicky time-waster than useful to be honest.

Re: Solidworks Motion
 

At this stage, everything is. I think we are at least a decade away from having a useful, mainstream FRC simulator.

Re: Solidworks Motion
 

To be fair, Gazebo has always been a real pain. In my mobile robotics class one of the groups decided to get it running as their final project. Their final presentation was essentially: "yeah uh, this is a finicky piece of crap, we spent 4 weeks trying to get it running according to it's instructions and it sorta almost works."

Re: Solidworks Motion
 

Someone I spoke to the other day in VA said he had started to develop a simulator for SOLIDWORKS and asked if I had used it or had looked at it yet. He was a mentor from team 190 and he had a presentation for this at Championships this year. Contact team 190 for information because I believe it has been posted before. I cannot find it in my searches.

http://users.wpi.edu/~first/2012/index.html