What’s new in MORSE 0.6?

General

  • Compatibility with Blender from 2.59 to 2.64a.
  • MORSE is now compatible with Windows 32 and 64 bit. Thanks to Markus Sander for providing the patches and testing
  • The ‘morse’ executable has slightly different options now. run ‘morse -h’ for details.
  • Added support for ‘no color’ and ‘reverse colors’ log output.
  • Added support for specifying the geometry of the simulator window.
  • Unit-tests coverage improved
  • MORSE (core, ie with only socket support) is now packaged in Debian (and Ubuntu): morse-simulator

User interface

  • Possibility to configure and display the view from a simulated camera inside the Blender screen
  • Reset the position of the global camera (CameraFP) by pressing F8

Components

Sensors

  • Major rewriting of the IMU sensor and odometry sensor, which now returns more precise datas. While here, add some modifiers to allow more realistic behaviour of such sensors.

Actuators

  • New differential drive actuator associated to the previously mentioned robots, called ‘v_omega_diff_drive’. It converts a given v, omega into left and right wheel speeds
  • Waypoint actuator can be configured to give target destination also in the Z axis. Useful for helicopters and submarines

Robots

  • Several models for quadrotors, including more or less realistic controls (using waypoints, stabilized fly model or directly in force). ROS support rely on ASCTEC messages.
  • New more physically realistic robots: Segway RMP 400 and Pioneer 3-DX. Thanks to David Hodo and Pierrick Koch for their work on the physics simulation
  • B21 robot model
  • New textured model for the Yamaha R-Max helicopter
  • Simple model of a submarine robot, along with an underwater environment

Human simulation

  • Several behaviour fixes in the human control mode
  • Human avatar can now be correctly placed in the scene using the Builder API scripts
  • New tutorial to learn how to control the human avatar
  • Documentation of simulation of multiple humans
  • Kinect-based control of the human in the simulator

Misc

  • Corrections to the bounding boxes of buildings in outdoor scenarios. Also added textures to the buildings
  • Dependencies on Blender Python API are now wrapped in a single file

Middlewares

  • Lots of improvements on ROS compatibility. Many new tutorials with detailed explanations, including an update ROS navigation tutorial.
  • Corrections to YARP middleware, allowing it to export data stored as Python lists
  • Improvements to the multi-node architecture using HLA. Including new tutorials and documentation
  • Updated ROS support for Fuerte compatibility

Documentation

  • Make table of contents of the components with images

Misc

  • Add methods in builder to configure UTM coordinates and temperature in the scene. Previously in the Scene_Script_Holder