pic: Team 548 simulator pic 2

[Robostang 548]

Originally Posted by Pavan

What has been the drivers’ reaction to the program and how well do you think it compares to the driving of the actual robot?

It compares pretty well at driving the robot in real life in terms of being constrained by the viewpoint of behind the alliance station as well as being able to move the rack. It uses the AGEIA Phisx physics engine and can simulate tipping the robot on some of the ramp objects we made. Other than that its not that good for training our drivers because we haven’t put in enough time to figure out how to make a working end effector to pick up ringers for are other driver. The only thing we could really use to learn how to make this was some of the example files from Microsoft. There really aren’t to many forums and documents about the Microsoft robotics studio yet. Another problem this software poses with training our driver is that our robot has a gearshift button that switches it between a high-speed low torque and low speed high torque. We were able to switch between the two but not by joystick button. Our drivers have seen the sim and are impressed but haven’t gotten to use it too much because only one of our programmers has it on his laptop. The rest of our programmers don’t have laptops, don’t have laptops with a supported graphics card, or don’t want to put the software on their computer. Hopefully by next year Microsoft will have released more documentation or even a book to make their simulations easier to program. One cool thing about Microsoft robotics studio though is that if your robot controller is supported (FRC is not supported, or just hopefully not yet ) it will let you program it in Visual Studio 2005 in your language of choice. Thanks for showing your interest in our project.