What’s new in MORSE 1.2?

General

• Time management in Morse has been clarified (#388). See time management documentation for more details about it.
• Implement the notion of zone, i.e. a 3d space which several properties which can trigger various behaviours in the simulation. See here to see how to define zone in your scenario.
• Add new services for the CamaraFP settings.
• F7 moves CamaraFP above robots

Components

• Each component now has two new services:

  • get_properties returns the list of the properties of the component
  • get_configurations returns the value of the different properties of the component.

Robots

• Most robots are now using more realistic physical behaviour.

Actuators

• Armatures have received some love, with support for placing and controlling inverse kinematics targets to easily control the full skeleton with inverse kinematics.
• The default ControlType of several actuators (Linear and angular speed (V, W) actuator, Waypoint, Linear and angular speed (Vx, Vy, W) actuator, Keyboard Actuator, Joystick Actuator) has been switched from “Position” to “Velocity”. It basically means it relies more on the underlaying physic engine, providing a more realistic behaviour, but it may be less repeatable. The previous behaviour can be restored by setting explicitly the ControlType parameter of the actuator (#117).

Sensors

• Each sensor has now an additional field timestamp exporting when the data has been computed, in simulated time.
• the GPS has been vastly improved. In addition to (x, y, z) position, it can also returns geodesic coordinates and velocity in the raw level of details. Moreover, it exposes also time and heading in the extended level.
• Batteries are now rechargeable in ChargingZone.

Middlewares

Pocolibs

• pocolibs is now able to export velodyne sensor.

Socket

• Add a new DepthCamera publisher.
• VideoCamera now publish base64 encoded RGBA image.

Builder API

API changes

• place_camera and aim_camera has been deprecated in favor of set_camera_location and set_camera_rotation.
• Velodyne became VelodyneRayCast and VelodyneZB became Velodyne VelodyneZB still works for compatibility.

API addition

• Add a method Environment.set_physics_step_sub allowing to control the number of substep used by the physics engine. A bigger number will make the simulation slower, but more realistic. The default value in Morse is 2.

Pymorse

API addition

• Add two methods sleep and time to handle time-related request. These methods are equivalent to the one provided by the Time module, but considers properly the simulated time. It is recommended to use these methods over Time one.