[Opensim-dev] Robotics in OpenSim?

[kino at daxtron.com]

Hi Ben,

I was asking similar questions in IRC last week with respect to combining real time servo models with the existing animation system. I was looking at dynamic generation and relay of BVH file (or the equivelent content). This touched the topics of ODE interaction with avatars and streaming the animation information from the client to the server. 

One point/question is : Are the animation and in-world movement seperate? I would assume so since you can fly, float, teleport etc. If so then one aspect of Player/Gazebo should be fairly easy to implement since it can at one level think of the avatar as a standard wheeled (as in polar coordinate driven) robot. A simple example: if you tuck your avatars legs up, does it fall to the ground, and if so why? How does physics know to drop the body? Simple bounding box or something more complex? How does the animation affect the skeleton and bounding boxes and how does the bounding boxes affect the in world interaction? And of course how can you affect the skeleton in a way other than animation?

I'm also tasked with helping the OpenCog get into Opensim as my Gsoc project, so any help will be at least doubly appreciated. I've been focused more on adding to Opensim scripting functions and languages, but did add to the in-world sensor functions. So while there are unknown sections to me, its not completly foreign.

Bests,
Kino

p.s. Oh, goody! More help! Need a fact finding field trip to China!

-----Original message-----
From: "Ben Goertzel" ben at goertzel.org
Date: Thu,  1 May 2008 12:25:49 -0400
To: opensim-dev at lists.berlios.de
Subject: [Opensim-dev] Robotics in OpenSim?

>  Hello OpenSimmers ...
>  
>  I am interested in the possibility of using OpenSim to have
>  human-controlled avatars
>  interact with realistically-controlled simulations of robots.
>  Furthermore, I **may** have
>  found a way to get a couple people to do actual work to enable this, under my
>  supervision... (they would be at a Chinese university ... long story...)
>  
>  Question is whether it's feasible or not.
>  
>  My thought is to integrate the Player framework
>  
>  http://playerstage.sourceforge.net/
>  
>  into OpenSim somehow.  They have a 3D sim framework called Gazebo, and I thought
>  of somehow integrating aspects of Gazebo w/ OpenSim, but on reflection
>  probably the
>  best option is just to hook Player up to OpenSim to that in effect
>  OpenSim replaces
>  Gazebo.
>  
>  Hooking Player up to OpenSim would seem to require work on both the client
>  and server side.
>  
>  On the server side, Player is C whereas OpenSim is C# but this seems
>  unproblematic
>  as the two can communicate via sockets.  The question is whether
>  OpenSim is open to
>  having the skeleton of a character controlled by some external process
>  (which would
>  simulate a servomotor attached to each joint) rather than controlled
>  by a fixed set of
>  animations.   I suppose the situation where Player controls a skeleton
>  is not that
>  fundamentally different from the one where a skeleton is controlled by
>  some inverse
>  kinematics equations or what-not.
>  
>  On the client side, again, things are different if the robot is not
>  controlled by a fixed
>  set of animations.  Could this be handled by adding a client-side
>  plug-in to RealXTend
>  or some other viewer?
>  
>  What I'm looking for is an indication of whether OpenSim experts think this is
>  a generally feasible direction; and if so, any clues on the best technical
>  approach.
>  
>  I have more experience with Second Life and Multiverse than OpenSim.
>  
>  Thanks
>  Ben
>  
>  
>  -- 
>  Ben Goertzel, PhD
>  CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC
>  Director of Research, SIAI
>  ben at goertzel.org
>  
>  "If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they
>  will surely become worms."
>  -- Henry Miller
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