TARDEC-Groves Simulator

[Jack Jones]

A blast from the past – and for your amusement - re-visit last year’s game via the TARDEC-Groves robotic simulator:

http://www.grovesrobotics.org/virtualrobot.zip

Go to the “bin” directory and launch “virtual_first”
Then – File->Open
Select the only option TARDEC-Groves05.ecl
Press – Start

You may wonder why we produced this. It’s long story having to do with thermal signature modeling and a proof of principal toward utilizing simulators to produce the thermal curves of vehicle propulsion systems.

Sorry that we had to cheat in picking up and scoring tetras - 06 was upon us before we could get to the tetra-goal interaction parts.

Please PM me if yoy have any problems running it on your machine. We'd like to know before we send the study up the chain.

Thanks,
Jack

[Bill_Hancoc]

about 5-10 seconds after i change a setting like bot start or press the start button it says an unexpected error occured and sends an error report. nice interface tho sounds cool

[Nuttyman54]

Originally Posted by Bill_Hancoc

about 5-10 seconds after i change a setting like bot start or press the start button it says an unexpected error occured and sends an error report. nice interface tho sounds cool

you need to go to File>Open... and open the TARDEC-Groves05.ecl file.

Looks pretty cool. Is there any interactivity other than the camera? also, it seems that the bot restarts when i change the camera angle.
It also will play only as red, even when It's on the Blue alliance.
Cool program

[Jack Jones]

Originally Posted by Bill_Hancoc

about 5-10 seconds after i change a setting like bot start or press the start button it says an unexpected error occured and sends an error report. nice interface tho sounds cool

I should have warned you that the usual functions were gutted for the PWM file driven simulation. It usually gets interactive input from game pads. OTOH, the OPEN-START (in that order) process should work - any other menu button press is unpredictable. I've run it on my '00 WinMe, my '95 Xp PowerSpec, and my Xp laptop. Is the OPEN-START process not working at all? Do you hear the ta-da-dot-da-da upon Start - Maybe it's not finding the sound files in ../sounds/

Does the field and all appear when you load the geometry?

Sorry that it's not any where near ready for distribution - especially in it's current hacked upon state. Just thought some would find it interesting. The PWM file driver gives me notions of a PWM stream autonomous program. Could fit a bunch of instructions that way - but try debugging that!!!

[Tristan Lall]

The same error occurs for me when I run it from a shortcut (which doesn't specify the executable's directory as a working path), but running it by clicking on the executable directly works fine. Actually, the same error occurs when you try to change settings before loading the .ecl file.

In any event, once launched correctly, it works excellently, other than the fact that it likes to ignore mouse input while it's running. (I can also verify that it works on Windows 2000 SP4 and on Windows 98 as a VM in MSVPC 2004.)

Remember that FIRST Video Game thing; I think that this was (some of) what they had in mind, especially with respect to the functional mechanisms and graphics.

[Jack Jones]

Like I said - it's in a very hacked condition right now. For instance, the match the video came from had the robot in Red #1. I got tired of having to set the Robot start, so I hard wired it in code. All those spin boxes call the same function, so the hard wire amounts to a hard re-start, without a close - reopen sequence of the PWM stream file - sloppy, but I had a major deadline.

If you want the driver's POV - press that first, then press start.
Same for Driver Looks-At
But robot starting position just flat won't work. I should have disabled it.

BTW - Here's the video it was modeled after.
http://www.grovesrobotics.org/west-michigan-pics
Follow the MOVIES->"Competition Link"

I was amazed that it only took 202 lines of PWM values to model the entire match.

hummm - I wonder if we could loose those pesky drivers

[Bill_Hancoc]

very cool and nice looking. looks great.
i couldnt watch the whole thing because after about 30 seconds it started to run really slow on my computer but i was looking through the textures folder and was wonderin g if all the images were used?

[Jack Jones]

Originally Posted by Bill_Hancoc

very cool and nice looking. looks great.
i couldnt watch the whole thing because after about 30 seconds it started to run really slow on my computer but i was looking through the textures folder and was wonderin g if all the images were used?

Nope -not all images. Didn't have the time/nerve to clean them out for fear of totally breaking it.