Labview Simulator... multiple custom bots?

[orob]

I've been thinking about how to engage more students into programming since only one or two really get to touch the laptop during the matches. From a training perspective I think the answer lies in using the simulator. The simulator is very cool once it works. The 2013 off-season competition maze was pretty cool, but very difficult for a true beginner.

For arial assist we as a programming team tested different PID settings to see who could use the stock forklift bot in the simulator and make a goal in autonomous. We had one student pick up the ball, and then spin the robot to fling the ball into the goal and it worked. The PID was kind of weird run to run because it autotuned and persisted, but it was pretty cool. I've been wondering since then if it wasn't possible to set up one machine as a simulation and allow students to target deploy their robot to that simulator so we could run multiple robots and have a virtual competition within the simulation.

Beyond that Labview comes with a bot editor that I found difficult to work with when trying to customize the simulation robot to look like our team machine and test the code the students wrote. I believe it is possible to customize your own bot to work in the simulator, but I have not made it work yet.

Has anyone tried either a custom bot or getting multiple bots in one simulation? How did you do it? How much ram / graphics memory was required to do it? Was it worth the time? How have you engaged your younger student programmers to help them "get it?"