[ODE] new user

[Bill Sellers]

Well yes and no. The advantage of using ODE straight is that you can  
make it very lightweight and it can run without any graphics at all.  
During the learning phases for your legged robot you may not be  
interesting in seeing what happens - you may just want to run the  
simulation a lot of times. I do my simulations on a beowulf cluster  
and graphics libraries aren't even installed on the nodes so bare ODE  
is the way to go for me. The drawstuff code is adequate if you don't  
need much user interaction and it's so easy to see what's going on  
that if/when you need to do something else it's very easy to modify.

However you asked about alternatives. Dynamechs has a multilegged  
walking robot as a demo and might be worth a look. Saying that I  
prefer ODE and it can certainly cope with legged locomotion. You can  
have a look at this movie (but it's pretty slow to load so go away  
and make a cup of tea):

http://homepage.mac.com/wis/ASL/Projects/Elastic%20Mechanisms/index.html

Cheers
Bill

On 5 Feb 2006, at 21:09, Megan Fox wrote:

> You might give OGRE a try.  It's a rendering engine that's reasonably
> user-friendly, and it has an ODE extension.  I think Crystal Space
> might have one too, and I believe Irrlicht has some manner of support
> for ODE as well.  There's also Nebula 2.
>
> There's also PyOGRE (and likely other high-level wrappers) if you want
> to do this in script rather than compiled code.
>
> If your goal to make a game/demo/etc, just start with an existing
> engine.  You only need start from scratch if your goal is to
> specifically design an engine.
>
> On 2/4/06, alaysamhak at aol.com <alaysamhak at aol.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hello All, I just recently subscribed to the mailing list, just  
>> wanted to
>> say hello. I would like to use ode to design a robot. I would like  
>> to see if
>> this robot can learn to walk, by applying certain forces to  
>> multiple joints
>> at each time step, and see if I can compute the end velocity of  
>> the entire
>> body. This is mainly for a thesis I'm working on. Do you recommend  
>> I use
>> ode? if not are there other options?
>>
>> -ALso I'm having trouble getting started, I'm pretty good at  
>> programming in
>> c++, however, I typically have problems getting started with the  
>> software,
>> configuring everything. I went to the website and I downloaded binary
>> releases for windows, since I'm most comfortable with windows.  
>> However I get
>> this ode-0.5.tar file, I tried opening it in microsoft visual  
>> studio 6.0,
>> however, it seems like it can't read the file. Can someone help me  
>> get
>> started, let me know what kind of software and development  
>> environment I
>> need to use?
>>
>> ALso to be able to draw the spider it seems like i need opengL,  
>> where can I
>> get it from and how do i configure it with ode?
>>
>> Thank you very much in advance,
>>
>> -Bill
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>>
>>
>
>
> --
> -Megan Fox
> http://shalinor.circustent.us/megan/resume/
>
> Lead Developer, Elium Project
> http://www.elium.tk
>
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