[gblake]

Originally Posted by Chris Hibner

Thanks again, Blake, for the wonderful simulator. I read the thread in your link, and I'm impressed at the direction things are heading.

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It's my opinion that in order to get teams more involved in using control strategies, a good simulation platform is needed. This would allow the teams to come up with control strategies, implement the algorithms, and test them in the virtual world - all in parallel to the mechanical team designing and building the real robot. This would provide a safe learning environment for the controls people and it would give the rest of the team some confidence that the control strategies will work once the robot is finished.

I think we're getting much closer to having simulation capability in FIRST. Thanks again to Blake for everything that's come so far.

You are quite welcome - It has been and continues to be fun. Also it has been very much a team effort, even on Day 1 of the project there were two of us involved (one of the two Davids). Now there are several more folks contributing.

And - Just in case anyone is wondering, I/we agree. We have an OK simulation that makes a fairly fun computer game, and is a useful but imperfect tool for teams; but among other things we really, really need to beef up the accuracy/realism of the physics and of the robot designs. To that end, I'm going to ask for either a magic wand or ten pounds of No-Doze for Christmas

That said, the current code still makes a good place to wrap your head around both the simple and hard parts of autonmously playing a FIRST game. Back in 2008, when I "taught" the Java client (see this post Java Client ) to play simulated Overdrive fairly well (using brute force heuristics), I learned a ton about both Overdrive strategy and autonomous complexities. With that in mind, those of you who want to experiment in a safe learning/teaching environment should be peppering me with weekly emails and PMs telling me to hurry up and release a version you can insert your own code into.

Of course, by definition simulators are not the real thing; but simulators are useful; and one that can mostly satisfy many of the wishes expressed in this thread so far is available. Don't get left behind when all the other teams start using it.

Blake