Comments on: Quadruped robot nearly together, and MRDS simulation work http://ausrobotics.com/2008/09/quadruped_robot_nearly_together_and_mrds_simulation_work/ Because someone has to build our future robot overlords! Tue, 29 Sep 2009 00:24:51 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 hourly 1 By: ash http://ausrobotics.com/2008/09/quadruped_robot_nearly_together_and_mrds_simulation_work/comment-page-1/#comment-6817 ash Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 #comment-6817 <p>Wow great work mate, it's really coming together!</p><p>It must be awesome to be where you are at after working on it for so long. I have been meaning to check out MSRS for ages now and seeing someone else use it successfully is really inspiring. I already use Visual Studio 24x7 for my dev so developing stuff for it would probably be quite easy.</p><p>How did you import the mesh etc for your model into it? Was it the dxfs from your cad package?</p><p>Have you noticed anything particularly annoying/awesome about it?</p><p> Keep up the good work :) </p> Wow great work mate, it’s really coming together!

It must be awesome to be where you are at after working on it for so long. I have been meaning to check out MSRS for ages now and seeing someone else use it successfully is really inspiring. I already use Visual Studio 24×7 for my dev so developing stuff for it would probably be quite easy.

How did you import the mesh etc for your model into it? Was it the dxfs from your cad package?

Have you noticed anything particularly annoying/awesome about it?

 Keep up the good work :)  

]]> By: RobotsAustralia http://ausrobotics.com/2008/09/quadruped_robot_nearly_together_and_mrds_simulation_work/comment-page-1/#comment-6844 RobotsAustralia Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 #comment-6844 Thanks Ash, yeah, it's a good feeling to see a bit of progress for a change. I'll be happier still when the robot actually moves under it's own steam! Since the posting I've mounted the two cameras to the head, so it's that little bit closer. MRDS: The biggest impediment to just picking up and using MRDS for the newcomer is the terminology I think. When I first looked through the package nothing was immediately obvious to me, to accomplish fairly simple things seemed to require lots of arcane knowledge. I'm sure it would be worlds easier though for a developer who already knows C# and web dev concepts like SOAP (which MRDS heavily borrows from), but even then there are new concepts introduced to handle concurrent tasks and so on with fresh acronyms thrown in. Simple to install and play around with the shipped demos, but to actually accomplish anything I might need seemed to be require a lot of investment in learning. The big breakthrough for me was buying the book "Pro MRDS" from wrox; http://www.wrox.com/WileyCDA/WroxTitle/Professional-Microsoft-Robotics-Developer-Studio.productCd-0470141077.html This book is very well written and clear (even the occasional joke thrown in), and has a number of really cool examples which are much closer to what I might need than the ms demos. The quad sim I wrote is adapted from their hexapod simulation for instance. Getting the meshes from cad to mrds is relatively pain free - for each moving part, export an STL file from the cad software, load into blender, adjust the scale (can't quite work this out, required scale seems to change from part to part, even though all my parts are designed with mm), move the part so the origin agrees with the physics shape defined in MRDS, apply a texture or material using blender, export as OBJ, and MRDS reads in the OBJ and uses it. In practice it takes a few goes back and forth in blender to rotate the model so the axes line up with MRDS, and if I want one physical object in MRDS to have more than one colour, you have to export each object separately as STL files, then load more than one into blender so they are separate meshes, applying different materials to each. If I try to export a whole assembly of parts from cad as one STL, then the whole thing becomes one mesh with one colour. If I was better at blender I'm sure I could chop the mesh into separate objects, maintaining their relative positions, but I couldn't figure that out. cheers, Murray ----------------------------------------------------------------------- http://robotsaustralia.googlepages.com Thanks Ash, yeah, it’s a good feeling to see a bit of progress for a change. I’ll be happier still when the robot actually moves under it’s own steam! Since the posting I’ve mounted the two cameras to the head, so it’s that little bit closer.

MRDS:
The biggest impediment to just picking up and using MRDS for the newcomer is the terminology I think. When I first looked through the package nothing was immediately obvious to me, to accomplish fairly simple things seemed to require lots of arcane knowledge. I’m sure it would be worlds easier though for a developer who already knows C# and web dev concepts like SOAP (which MRDS heavily borrows from), but even then there are new concepts introduced to handle concurrent tasks and so on with fresh acronyms thrown in. Simple to install and play around with the shipped demos, but to actually accomplish anything I might need seemed to be require a lot of investment in learning. The big breakthrough for me was buying the book “Pro MRDS” from wrox;
http://www.wrox.com/WileyCDA/WroxTitle/Professional-Microsoft-Robotics-Developer-Studio.productCd-0470141077.html
This book is very well written and clear (even the occasional joke thrown in), and has a number of really cool examples which are much closer to what I might need than the ms demos. The quad sim I wrote is adapted from their hexapod simulation for instance.

Getting the meshes from cad to mrds is relatively pain free – for each moving part, export an STL file from the cad software, load into blender, adjust the scale (can’t quite work this out, required scale seems to change from part to part, even though all my parts are designed with mm), move the part so the origin agrees with the physics shape defined in MRDS, apply a texture or material using blender, export as OBJ, and MRDS reads in the OBJ and uses it. In practice it takes a few goes back and forth in blender to rotate the model so the axes line up with MRDS, and if I want one physical object in MRDS to have more than one colour, you have to export each object separately as STL files, then load more than one into blender so they are separate meshes, applying different materials to each. If I try to export a whole assembly of parts from cad as one STL, then the whole thing becomes one mesh with one colour. If I was better at blender I’m sure I could chop the mesh into separate objects, maintaining their relative positions, but I couldn’t figure that out.

cheers,
Murray
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http://robotsaustralia.googlepages.com

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