What’s new in MORSE 1.4?

General

  • Numpy is now needed for Morse. It is used in several places where computations using mathutils is not precise enough (e.g., float vs. double precision).
  • Time management has been improved in various way. A morse_sync tool has been introduced to improve the precision and timing of high-frequency components (#683). If available in Blender (Blender > 2.77), it is also possible to accelerate or slow-down the simulation (#388). Moreover, Morse now tries to automatically compute the correct time settings. If you encounter any time related problem, make sure you read Time and event in MORSE and / or report the issue to the Morse project.

Components

Robots

  • The MORSE Human avatar has been entirely rewritten. The new human model is much simpler, yet much nicer (in particular, it features mesh skinning for attractive animations). On the downside, the interactive mode has gone for now. Depending on interest, it may be revived in a future version (possibly through external scripts, for added flexibility).

Actuators

  • The semantics of the Waypoint and Destination actuators has slightly changed: once the destination is reached, they no longer actively attempt to stay at this position. This allows another motion actuator to ‘take over’ the control of the robot. The previous behaviour is still desirable in certain cases (notably for flying robots), and can be re-enabled by setting the property RemainAtDestination to true: motion.properties(RemainAtDestination=True). This option is also added to the Rotorcraft Waypoint motion controller actuator, but it defaults to true (hence, no behaviour change compared to MORSE 1.3).
  • The Orientation Actuator actuator has been enhanced to possibly work more realistically, by limiting the speed of the rotations. The default is still to go directly to the desired orientation.
  • The Keyboard Actuator and Joystick Actuator actuators no longer call the robot’s apply_speed method with values set to zero when no input is received. The previous behaviour prevented them from being used in combination with another motion actuator (since they would always overwrite other motion commands with zeros).
  • The Armature Actuator actuator has two new services (rotate_joints and translate_joints) that let the user set the rotations/translations of only a subset of the armature’s joints by providing a custom mapping {joint name: value}.
  • The Rotorcraft attitude motion controller has been extended to be able to control the rotorcraft in yaw rate or in absolute yaw (using the YawRateControl property). So it is now possible to use, for example, normal yaw or north using the property UseAngleAgainstNorth. Also, you can configure the actuator to use a linear or quadratic thrust model using LinearThrust.
  • Added a new Drag “actuator” which allows for the simulation of a drag (air resistance) force opposing the robot’s movement. If used, this allows more realistic simulations.
  • Added a new External Force/Torque actuator which can apply external force (typically force from the environment such as wind), to a robot. It has the same interface as Force/Torque Motion Controller, but applies force in the global frame.
  • Added a new Quadrotor dynamic controller actuator which supports controlling a quadrotor from the speed of its four engines, using a simple dynamic equation.

Sensors

  • The longitude, latitude and altitude properties are no longer properties of GPS but must be set at the environment level. Moreover, the property angle_against_north allows the angle between the X-axis and the geographic north to be configured (It must be positive when the Blender X-axis is East of true North, negative if is West of true North.).
  • Added a new high-level Attitude sensor sensor, allowing the computation of the system’s attitude.
  • Added a new Magnetometer sensor, allowing the computation of the Earth’s magnetic field vector.
  • Extended the Inertial measurement unit sensor, to also return the magnetic field vector.
  • Fixed the Collision sensor: it now detects collisions only when it is actually colliding (before, any object in a 1x1x1m box around the sensor would return a collision). Also the documentation has been improved with the addition of a complete example.
  • Added a new Airspeed sensor, allowing the computation of the speed of a vehicle relative to the air.

Modifiers

  • Introduced ECEF, Geodetic, and Geocentric modifiers, allowing the conversion of coordinates from Blender world to ECEF-r or Geodetic or Geocentric coordinates (and vice-versa). This should improve interoperability with flight systems in general.
  • Introduced the Feet modifier, to convert imperial units to meter units (and vice-versa)

Middlewares

General

  • Introduced a binding for the Mavlink protocol, easing the interoperability of Morse with a lot of free autopilots / architectures.

ROS

  • Some ROS ‘housekeeping’ has been performed in this release, including removing the need for rospkg (easier installation!), removing the ROS interface with the non-standard (and unused?) JointPositions message, and removing references to roslib.load_manifest(), a hangover from the rosbuild-era.

HLA

  • Now automatically handle the case where attributes published by Morse are not owned by it.
  • Allow the specification of a stop_time for the simulation (in simulated seconds)
  • Make lookahead configurable for the Morse federate.

YARP

Builder API

API additions

  • It is now possible to import environments composed of multiple scenes. The user should choose which is the main_scene when importing the environment. In addition, the Environment.set_background_scene method has been added to configure the scene to use as background (#651).
  • The bpymorse.set_speed method , used to change the frequency of Morse’s main loop is now deprecated in favor of the Environment.simulator_frequency method.
  • The Environmement.set_time_scale method allows the simulation to be accelerated or slowed-down (#388).
  • The new Environment.use_vsync method allows the vsync parameter to be controlled.

Pymorse

  • Robots created in loops are now intelligently handled. They are still usable as before, but it is also possible to access them using the list foos (if your robot name is foo) (#358).
  • Streams are now created lazily, fixing control with a large number of robots / sensors (#626).