SIMDERELLA 2.0

Version 2.0 of simderella is here. Major adaptations:

now features Imakefiles;
compiles & runs on Solaris and DEC Alpha;
some C bugs squashed;
bemmel can grab robot with mouse;
major improvements to documentation (i.e., an introductory article describing the package).
includes a stand-alone version of bemmel for drawing geometrical objects, with viewoint rotation. Figures can be dumped to xfig for later inclusion in your papers.

Simderella is a robot simulator consisting of three programs:

	connel: your controller
	simmel: the simulator
	bemmel: the X-windows oriented graphics front-end

Simmel is the part which actually simulates the robot. It performs a few matrix multiplications, based on the Denavit Hartenberg method, calculates velocities with the Newton-Euler scheme, and communicates with the other two programs.

Bemmel only displays the robot. It is a fast general-purpose display method which places separate objects in space depending on the homogeneous matrices it receives from simmel.

Connel is the controller, which must be designed by the user. In the distributed version, connel is a simple inverse kinematics routine. No neural networks are included.

The three programs communicate via Unix sockets. This means that

you need sockets
all the programs can run on different machines

Since data communication is high-level (all data is encoded before transmission), cross architecture portability is high. In fact, connel can simultaneously control a real robot and the simulated one.

Simderella likes to sleep; that is, when nothing happens, no processor time will be used.

The software is available via anonymous ftp from ftp.wins.uva.nl, directory pub/computer-systems/aut-sys/software/.

Extract the simulator from the tar file by typing at the Unix command line

	Unix> gunzip -c simderella.2.0.2.tar.gz | tar xf -

or use your favourite extracting commands. In the simderella/ directory, type Unix> xmkmf Unix> make Makefiles Unix> make clean Unix> make depend Unix> make The sub-directories are recursively visited and executables are compiled and linked.

Supported architectures:

	Sun (SunOS and Solaris)
	SGI
	DEC Alpha
	HP700
	386 et al (running Linux)

If you're impatient, execute the thing as follows:

	cd bemmel; Zoscar & cd ..
	cd simmel; source env; simmel1 ns & cd ..
	cd connel; connel s

all on one machine. Then type commands like fix-target 50 50 50 inverse 50 50 50 or move the mouse pointer in the bemmel window and press an `l' or `r' or `u' or `d' or ....

Patrick van der Smagt