Underwater Rov simulator

lyap · Post by **lyap** » Wed Oct 22, 2008 4:54 pm

Hello everybody,
I'm a complete newbie of irrlicht but before I start playing with it I would like to know if it is the right program for my needs.
I would like to develop an underwater rov simulator, or at least something to move a robot and a target into it.
My aim is to simulate the robot's movement, retrieve it's coordinates somehow and send them to a custom build hardware board (to set for example a route) trought canbus or rs232 and then back to irrlicht.
Are irrlich + a physical simulator the right tools I need?
Does something like it already exist?
I tried serching the forum but I didn't find anything.
Many thanks to everybody who will answer.

Frank Dodd · Post by **Frank Dodd** » Wed Oct 22, 2008 5:16 pm

I think Irrlicht alone would be fine for this, if you get your ROV model with a skeleton in it, you can set the joint angles yourself through the Irrlicht API and animate your model procedurally though your code.

I don't think you would need a physics engine unless you wanted the model to interact with its environment automatically.

I have done some very simple bone animations from FreeBasic with my IrrlichtWrapper to test the concept and they seam to work well.

rogerborg · Post by **rogerborg** » Wed Oct 22, 2008 5:32 pm

Irrlicht will be fine for the visualisation part. Whether you need a physics engine depends on whether part of the goal is to model buoyancy, water resistance and other physical effects. If so, then you may want to choose a physics engine and an appropriate dataset first, and then pick a visualisation solution later.

aboeing · Post by **aboeing** » Thu Oct 23, 2008 4:10 am

you can try subsim:
http://www.adrianboeing.com/products.html#subsim

lyap · Post by **lyap** » Thu Oct 23, 2008 11:25 pm

Thank you all for your help!
I think I'm going to take a look to subsim first, and in case I will explore the irrlicht world, which seems very fascinating.