A robotics simulation software that emulates the hardware of Lego EV3 Devices and more.
!! EV3Sim is currently in the early stages of development. Nothing is set in stone.
In the map creation, every physics material needs:
- The collidable layer
- The light-collide layer (for colour sensors)
Scaling engine force by the speed_sp variable is bad. This should use PID to get to a specified RPM, but this is currently blocked by godotengine/godot#68193. Other than that using VehicleWheel3Ds seems to be the easiest. The only long term issue this may cause is that wheels need to be at the top-level of the bot hierarchy, which isn't the end of the world.
Simply using a raycast here seems to work.
Using a raycast then interpreting the colour from the physics material seems to be the only way. This works for single colour materials or sprites, so our maps will have to be limited to these two. In order to determine what layers have 'color', layer 9 must be enabled.
TODO: Use multiple raycasts and take average colour to allow for gradients.
If there is an easier way very open to ideas
These should be relatively simple using a collision box (This should be a sensor). Ensure the vehicles are in their own layer to avoid issues.
Easiest approach seems to be to keep a global list of IR emitters and then doing a raycast to check availability rather than raycasting all over the place.
EV3Sim is written in the ~Godot game engine for Godot 4. To get started, clone the repository, open Godot, and click the "Import" button, selecting the repository folder.
- Higher fidelity simulation than the original ev3sim (2d -> 3d)
- Support multiple languages and ways of working
- Support many of the customisation features present in original ev3sim (something akin to custom presets)
- Provide an easy way to replay games for tournament settings or testing
- Require at most minimal code change from the user point of view between simulation and reality (Some small tweaks seem required, but make it easy to support a new language).
- Be beholden to the python implementation of ev3dev
- Package python or any other language with the installation of EV3Sim
- Require major changes to the integrating language libraries
The project is comprised of the following folders:
- Devices: Scripts and Prefabs for simulating devices in EV3Sim.
- Testing: Temporary files for trying out things.
- Simulation: Various scripts ran in simulation for features. Includes game logging, load orchestration.
- GUI: The GUI, and various functionality surrounding the GUI.
- Playgrounds: Definitions for soccer, rescue, and backbone for various others.
Here's a list of things that need to be done before a v1 can really be considered:
- Working bots, loaded from a filepath
- This filepath can represent a godot prefab, some custom yaml config, or something else. Still up in the air
- Working orchestration of multiple language executions
- Single click to spawn many bots and have them all running simultaneously
- Need to decide on how threading will be done, if just using Godot's threads is performant enough
- Single click to spawn many bots and have them all running simultaneously
- Working maps (soccer), loaded from a filepath
- Either a Godot prefab or something more structured like yaml which gets turned into a scene (Leaning towards scene)
- Minimal GUI (Play button, select prefab)
- Python implementation working
And here's things that could be added in future:
- Supporting other language implementations of ev3dev
- Adding support for other robotics devices through the same file read/write pattern
- In-Sim Bot Editor
- Easier to add custom levels
- File associations for launching custom levels
- Tournament scripts
- Replay functionality
- More!