Robotics Simulator

[BillB]

I'm really interested in using the UDK to develop realistic simulations of robotics systems - I'm particularly interested in good physics simulation and rich visualisations for visually guided robots, and how the UDK can be used with evolutionary algorithms for developing robot control architectures and for evolving different morphologies.

I know that the Unreal Tournament engine has been modded to create a robot sim (USARSim) so hopefully the UDK will make that project even better.

Anyone else interested in this kind of thing? - I'm more of an engineer than a software developer and learning the ins and outs of the UDK seems like a big task.

[neai]

I might be. I'm a programmer who happens to know the ins & outs of this thing. Interested in non gamey applications of this tech too.

As far as physics goes, keep in mind that it's designed for realtime games and this one in particular is set up for an shooter. So it's just something to make things behave about right in a 1/1000th of a second, not to provide accuracy or stability.

[BillB]

neai:

Fair point about the physics accuracy. Simulator fidelity is always an issue with robotics and with GA's in particular as they will tent to exploit and useful flaws in the simulation - The open source engine ODE is used quite a bit and I have occasionally seen walking robots evolved in this environment that have somehow discovered how to fly:)

There are plenty of techniques to compensate for this 'reality gap' though and I'm particularly interested in developing adaptive controllers that can cope with the transition from a fast but low fidelity physics sim to the real world.