What’s new in MORSE 1.1?

General

  • morse tools has now some options to easily create custom simulations: check ‘morse {create|rm|add} –help’ for more on that topic! Or have a look to the new MORSE quickstart tutorial.

Components

  • Modifiers use now a class-base scheme, similarly to datastream input / output (#330).

Actuators

  • Improve the Light actuator, including more configurable parameters (in particular, the color of light and its energy). A new service ‘toggle’ allows to control it.
  • New 3D Sound actuator {play,pause,stop} from local mp3 file.
  • Add a joystick actuator allowing to control directly your robot using a joystick.

Robots

  • Introduce Morsy, the Morse mascot, now available directly in the simulator.
  • Introduce PatrolBot, a differential robot developed by MobileRobots.

Sensors

  • A new sensor Velocity allows to retrieve properly the velocities of a robot which use a physic controller.
  • The Semantic camera performance has been improved. It has a new option ‘noocclusion’ to disable occlusion testing and get even better performances.
  • The Thermometer Sensor has been reworked to handle multiple fire sources, potentially of different nature
  • Introduce a new sensor Collision which allows to detect if the robot is in collision with some objects of the environment.
  • Fix Camera resolutions ratio issue #371. We now create one Blender scene for each camera in the simulation, with specific render resolution.

Builder API

It is now possible to handle loop in builder script (#357). See Build your simulations for documentation about it.

API addition

  • make_ghost method allows to transform the robot in ghost mode (transparent and with no associated physics)
  • mass method allows to setup the mass of any component.
  • set_log_level allows to configure easily the level of log of each component. A service with similar name allows to do that at runtime too. (#337).
  • set_speed_camera allows to change the speed of the viewport camera.
  • set_friction allows to change friction parameter with the ground

API changes

  • add_default_interface has now a smarter behaviour (#399)

Pymorse

The Python bindings for MORSE have been completely rewritten and is now much more efficient (based on asynchat API). However, it is mostly an internal rewrite, and the interface does not change.

Multi-node

Rewrite the Multi-node Simulation using sockets client/server (internal). Use JSON instead of unsafe pickle.

Tools

  • Remove old Blender 2.4 geolandloader code
  • Add tools/terrain/blend_dtm.py to build map from a DEM and an Orthoimage