The Main Panel

 

 

Figure 2.2: The main panel. 

The simulator main panel has six control buttons, the view interval control dialog, and two sub-menus (the robot and the world ones described in the following sections). Each one of the control buttons have the following function:

• Run: Allow the execution of the user defined controller. From the moment this button is pressed the simulator executes the function usr_step  once each time slice and after its execution, the robot model is updated (and displayed if required).
• Step: Executes once the user defined controller and the robot and world update. This button is useful to monitor the workings of the robot controller in detail. If this button is pressed, the visualization interval is set to 1 so all frames are displayed.
• Stop: Stops the execution of the user defined controller (and so, stops the robot).
• Tools: Show a panel (see below) to select tools to move the camera that is focusing the world and the robot.
• Reset: Moves the robot (and the camera looking to it) to the initial position.
• Exit: Closes the simulator.

 

Figure 2.3: The tools panel. 

  Pushing the tools button opens the motion tools panel (figure 2.3). This panel allow us to choose between three tools to change the point of view over the world and the robot:

• Zoom: Approach or moves away the world to/from the camera.
• Fly: Translates the world up and down of left and right (as seen from the camera).
• Orbit: Rotates the world.

Once one command is selected (the corresponding button is shown pushed) we can move the camera by pushing the left mouse button over the robot display window and moving the mouse. The movements produced in this way have inertia (they continue even when the mouse button is released). To stop a movement just click with the mouse over the robot display window.

The three provided commands are a subset of the commands provided by Geomview . The rest of Geomview commands can also be used by typing the appropriate shortcuts (see the Geomview manual for details).

Observe that while the robot display window and the robot camera window are provided by Geomview,   the main panel and the rest of sub-panels have been designed and implemented by our selves. We have use the Xform   library and the source codes are provided with the simulator. Consequently, they can be modified to fit your preferences. However, this could be a hard work and we hope the default interface to be useful enough. May be the strongest restrictions of the provided interface is that we limit the robots to have at most 8 legs.