Training an Open Source 3DOF Palletizing Robot part 2

If you’ve followed the story so far from the beginning you’ll know that I have been building a program to simulate and train my robot arms.  In the program there are virtual copies of my real robots.  The real and virtual models are be synchronized 1:1 when connected.

It looks like the virtual robots in my simulator now have collision detection: they understand when they are touching each other.  That means I can make sure that the real robots are incapable of slamming into each other by giving the virtual robots more personal space than the real robots.  I’ve already made sure that they can’t bend in impossible ways or go through the table.  Now kids can drive the robot with relative safety – as long as they don’t get in it’s way, there shouldn’t be any accidents.

Get update 14 of the open source code from Github.

Next step is to record & playback animations.

Frankly, I’m kind of amazed at the framerate I’m getting for brute-force OpenGL graphics in Java in Debug mode.  I still remember using assembler code to draw triangles one pixel at a time in mode 13h.