BowlerStudio: A robotics development platform

I re-wrote the first few tutorial steps that a user sees. The first few concepts relate to how the scripts run and talk to each other. Then you get introduced to devices, then some of the supporting libraries such as cad, physics and audio playback.

http://neuronrobotics.com/BowlerStudio/Welcome-To-BowlerStudio/

I updated all of the introduction tutorials and reordered them a bit. i want to give you an ide of how the system works and how you would build things with it more slowly before introduciing specific library features.

I just added a new step to the intro. If you already have BowlerStudio, just navigate here:

http://neuronrobotics.com/BowlerStudio/JBulletPhysics/

I never thought i would be so amused by a bouncing ball...

And run it. You should see a Sphere created by JavaCad animated by the physics engine. I have a lot of work to do to define chains automatically from th DH system, but i think i could model a rigid body comprised of spheres representing feet for the walking robots. If i manage to carve out some time, this library might get us a fully integrated physics engine for robot modeling with just a week or two of dedicated work.

Any physics and Java nerds want to try to do something awesome? It should be possible to implement this entirely with scripts, no editing the BowlerStudio source.

I also noticed it can run the simulation MUCH faster than real-time. I have to add a pretty serious delay to make it run a loop as slow as the simulation is sampling. I think that means doing predictive balance catching is a real possibility. As in, in this configuration, will it tip over?

This is a key piece for a robotics development platform, and i am excited to see what this makes possible.

I added JBullet support to Releases of BowlerStudio 0.8.0+. This means your kinematics, walking, simulation scripts can all take into account physics as part of your control schema. This will also allow me (or some ambitious contributor) to add a full simulation environment for creatures. This will let you test walking gaits to see if they will work in the real world of physics.

This project is starting to feel more and more like a game engine targeted towards designing robotics and engineering tools.

I just posted an Amazon wishlist for all the parts you need to make the standard Carl the Hexapod.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/wishlist/C1SQC7YAFQFT/ref=cm_wl_list_o_1

Hey everyone, we just got featured on Product Hunt, so if you think our project is cool, please upvoat on there so lots of people get to see it? http://www.producthunt.com/tech/wifi-dyio-kickstarter

I made a screen-cast video of adding and removing limbs with Creature Lab.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/neuronrobotics/wifi-dyio-robot-controller-w-24-channels

Our kickstarter for the WiFi version of the DyIo just went live !

I taught a 3 day intensive class with these 2 kids to learn basic programming and robot control. THey said they wanted to build a talking Yoda, so that's what we built! It started with one of the legs from the Hexapod got its back-bone ccontrol. THis gave them the ability to place Yodas head in cartesian space using a game controller. they then recorded those loactions ans synced it up with the Text To Speech synthisys of each of his lines. Last they made a function that automatically ran his mouth based on what they had him say.

Here is the code that made it go: https://gist.github.com/madhephaestus/9ad31af45be2c1230da0

if you open that link in BowlerStudio, and a DyIO connected, yoda will start talking to you too!

I have made a bunch of usability and performance updates. The first big one is the moving of Creature definitions into a git hosted file. this is neat because the config file has hyperlinks to its remote files to define its kinematic, cad and walking engine. this means the entirety of a robot, its cad, kinematics and run code can all be sent to another user in a ready-to-use form through a tweet!

As in, if you open this link:

https://gist.github.com/madhephaestus/bcb4760a449190206170

in BowlerStudio via Menu>Add Device>Creatures>FromGist...

you will get a robot, all cad generated, and ready to walk.

In the latest revision i have also added Clojure as a supported language, so all you functional programming purest can now use a Lisp to build robots.

And the last feature is invisible, but powerful. In the background all files are cached to the disk using Git and are being pushed to git when saved. I will slowly move all of the configurations into a specifically structured set of files that cna be stored if your personal git repo.

I am working on a feature where the DyIo stores a git repo URL as its "default" code, so a DyIOs code can travel with it...

I *tried* to show everything in 2 minutes, and got a fast overview of the features. Needless to say many hours of video could be generated for this. We are very excited to be entered into the Hack-A-Day Best product and HAD Prize quarterfinals.