RiSE Robot Simulation Library

This is a fairly general purpose library that is designed to facilitate the definition and simulation of complex robot morphologies with custom surface contact models. It uses the Arachi dynamics engine (available from http://www.arachi.com) for the underlying physical simulations and provides convenient interfaces for defining morphologies through text configuration files, defining and configuring a variety of contact models as well as facilities for integration with RHexLib, a real-time robot control software library. This HTML hierarchy provides both an introductory description of the library as well as a complete reference that is automatically generated from the source itself.

The library consists of three major components

• The Creature Description Language (CDL): A simple text language definition and interface classes for defining and accessing different robot morphologies.
• Parameterized Contact Modeling Facilities (PCM): Facilities for defining and parameterizing relatively complicated surface contact models including adhesive materials, claw-like structures etc.
• Real-Time Control Interface (RTI): A variety of utility classes and functions for interfacing a simulated robot with real-time robot control architectures, in particular, RHexLib
• Basic math tools in basicmath.hh

This document also includes sections on

• Organization of the library source
• Compiling the library

For anyone interested in writing CDL files, please see the

• CDL Tutorial: A walk-through of using the CDL to design robots for use with the SimLib environment.

Important note: All the classes and functions in CDL libraries are defined within the namespace sim. As a consequence, developers must either enable the namespace with the C++ keyword using, or explicitly add the prefix "sim::" to all the class names and function calls.

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SimLib Reference Documentation