| RavenBlog |
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| Comments on Saturday 9 March 2013: |
| A product that should exist; robot simulator. With several environments and components as plugins so they can be easily added, with everything based on things that actually exist - so you could build a virtual robot, for example, made of an arduino board or a raspberry pi, say, with moisture sensors or GPS or cameras or LEDs or lasers or motors or arm-controllers or touch-screens or whatever, attached to whatever pins of the boards, plus batteries or solar panels or etc. then you can program it in a virtual arduino/pi programming environment, and see how it operates in a given context. Uses:
I realize it seems like an insanely complicated thing, but there's already basically all the physics simulation that's the hard part, making realistically inaccurate sensors is mostly trivial by comparison (though doing things like lasers flickering at an invisibly high frequency coupled with light sensors or large volumes of flowing water could be tough - it wouldn't be that hard to simulate adequately but it would be hard to simulate in real-time. But for non-human-controlled robots that's fine, you could simulate it slow overnight and play it back real-time the next morning to see what happens.) It seems like if such a product existed it would likely lead to vastly faster development of all sorts of useful automation. A lot of people like to solve problems or make cool things, but we can't all afford the hardware to experiment. [06:57] |