[asid61]

Originally Posted by Spoam

Wow, I missed this thread somehow. Anyways, I was intern for Autodesk and while I was there we worked on exactly this, a program we call "Synthesis":

It has a few parts: An Inventor plugin, which runs while your robot CAD is open and utilizes a path-search algorithm to intelligently simplify and link together meshes based on joint data from your CAD, and create a 3D representation of your robot which we import into our game simulator. Once all this data is extracted from your robot CAD, we have a GUI that shows detected joints, and allows you to place motors/pneumatics/sensors on them and assign ports to match your code (e.g. if you have a revolute joint, you might specify that it has a motor on it, controlled by "port 7").

Next you simply run the game simulator and import your robot into it.

Finally there is a loopback adapter and modified wpilib (we have support for c++ and java and working on labview iirc) that allows you to emulate having a crio/roborio so you can control your simulated robot through the driver station (and using 99% the same code you would on your real robot). The simulator receives control packets from the driver station and emulates your robot real-time.

I can't give an expected release date or anything, but the processes I described are currently implemented in a mostly functional Alpha. Second wave of development on it will begin this summer, so look out for it.

This is amazing. Best of luck on that project.