Spring as Research platform/visualizer

[pmrawk]

Hello,
I am new to Spring and I am interested in using the Spring engine as a visualization and simulation tool for robotics. Is it possible to have external applications/code (i.e. Java) control entities in Spring?

The platform I would like to develop would create robots and other vehicles in Spring, which are then controlled by algorithms running in another application. Perhaps Lua scripting would work, but I am not sure.

Any thoughts on where to go with this? Thanks!

-pm

[AF]

You should look into AI, a C++ AI or any of the other native AIs should be able to implement a socket to an external program with which to control a spring unit.

[Kloot]

Or you could use this.

[hoijui]

There is also a Java AI Interface, in case you prefer Java over C++ (which is what i suspect, reading your post). It is, even doh not yet widely used by publicly available AIs, the best maintained interface, in my opinion.

[pmrawk]

Thank you all for the advice! When you mention Java AI interface, is that part of the Spring project source, or someone else has written a Java library to talk to Spring? Java is my language of choice since most of my research code is written in it.

That Prog&Play also looks really promising! I will dig into the details of that as I plan my development.

-pm

[knorke]

I am interested in using the Spring engine as a visualization and simulation tool for robotics. Is it possible to have external applications/code (i.e. Java) control entities in Spring?

if i understand correctly you want not only to controll the unit in the way a player does ("drive there", "shoot this") but more detailed like moving the joints of a robot arm or something?

Not sure if AIs in spring have such detail control over units movement? Afaik such unit animations can only be done with cob/bos (scripting language of TA) or in Lua and an AI can not tell a units to ie lift its left arm. Except perhaps by some lua unit animation script that would somehow accept parameters from the ai, if there are any examples for this i would be interessted as well...