Similatiors

[Mark]

I've been looking around at simulators - more of a passing interest to be honest as I prefer to make the thing! :)

I wanted to hear of anyone's experiences good/bad...looking for sort of 3D sim with some kind of programming interface..

Cheers

Mark

[TheDuck]

The most straightforward one to play with that I've seen is the Microsoft Robotics Studio (http://msdn.microsoft.com/robotics/). For something a bit more gritty you could try out the Player Stage Project (http://playerstage.sourceforge.net/) but this requires some pretty serious programming ability and knowledge of Linux. There are also some commercial ones such as Webots (http://www.cyberbotics.com/). There are other lists such as here (http://dmoz.org/Computers/Robotics/Software/Simulation/) but these are ones I've seen.

The Microsoft one is pretty straightfoward to use. You have building blocks not unlike Mindstorms (http://mindstorms.lego.com/) that allow you to 'illustrate' your control system. The result is then transferable to a supported platform. You can see it operating in a simulation of the supported robot to test it.

Player/Stage/Gazebo also supports the idea of building a control system. It is an open source project gaining ground and membership but has been around for a bit. The concept is that you have a control program governed by the Player component and it interacts with an environment: either 2D Stage or 3D Gazebo. You can write it any way you want or use other layered robot software implementations available as open source.

I haven't played with Webots for a while but it's a similar idea. The nice thing, of course, is when you pay for it you get support!

There are more such as solidWorks but those are ones I've played with.