Simulator "Bob" Homepage

This project is an open-source 3D simulation environment designed for - but not limited to - the simulation of mobile robots. It uses ODE to simulate the ridig body dynamics and OpenSceneGraph for the 3D visualization. The GUI is realized by using MFC and, thus, the software is limited to Win32 platforms. It is written entirely in C++ and is compiled with MS Visual Studio 7.1. (Verison 6.0 would probably work as well but I don't maintain the project files for it.)

The key feature of this application is meant to be it's simplicity in getting started. You can easily install it and run some existing simulations. When creating your own simulation you only have to care about a very small and simple interface (look at the Documentation page for a Tutorial of a simple simulation).

I plan to simulate a system of autonomous mobile robots I'm currently building up as part of my PhD thesis. Although there is still a lot to du until this is possible and sufficiently realistic to make sence, it is already functional and surely useful for some applications.

If you use this software I'd appreciate if you let me know by sending me an e-mail. Also feel free to aks me in case of any questions regarding this project.

To find out more about my research project take a look on it's homepage.

Released new versions of SimBOB and also ClassCreatorBOB. The major improvements are a TCL-based script engine, a plugin-system and an extension of the light sensory system now also beeing able to handle reflected light.
A rough overview of the changes can be found on the Development page.

Released new versions of SimBOB. Finally I managed to reimplement the graphics engine using OpenSceneGraph. So far the only (but not to neglect) advantages are additional file formats for textures and complete models and an improved performance possibly allowing the use also on slower machines. The main reason for the reimplementation is the ability to add advanced graphical features more easily...
A rough overview of the changes can be found on the Development page and for more details look here.

Released new versions of SimBOB. The next version was meant to be 1.5.0 with a new visual engine based on OpenSceneGraph but this will take some more time and several bug-fixes and minor improvements justified a new release earlier...
A rough overview of the changes can be found on the Development page and for more details look here.

Released new versions of SimBOB and an adapted version of ClassCreator. I also added screenshots of th elatest simulations.
A rough overview of the changes can be found on the Development page and for more details look here.

Released new versions of the SimBOB and ClassCreator. SimBOB is now able to support dialog-components (e.g. to display sensor data or control a controller) and some components were added. This feature makes it reasonable to create extensions with MFC support (including resorces) so I added this capability to ClassCreatorBOB and - of course - adapted the existing code templates and added new ones for simulationdialogs.
Modifications in the base classes require the components for older version to be adapted a little. For more details about the latest changes look here.
On the documentation page you will also find two new tutorials that shoudl demonstrate how easy it is to create your own simulation with this software and give you an easy start...

Released new versions of the SimBOB and ClassCreator. The major improvement to simbob is the ability to communicate with other applications via local sockets (check out the file Demo.txt in the bin-directory to find out how to run a demo using this feature). It's now also little easier to refer to components in the simulation description. The major improvement to the ClassCreator is that you can also create your own extensions with it. I added a brief description about this in the documentation. The documentation classes (generated with doxygen) were also updated.

Added the description of the components and component types to the documentation that are new in version 1.4.0. The tutorials of how to create your own components is still completely missing but there are already quite a lot existing components where you can take a look how things work. Nevertheless I plan to add the tutorials in near future...

The simulator is now also able to simulate complex constructions consisting of rigid bodies, joints, actuators, sensors and controllers. Thus, it provides all simulation capabilities as v1.3.1 did. This version also includes some more demos including different passive and active pendulums, a six-legged robot and a (very simple) driving robot avoiding obstacles. Problems of the latest version I know about are listed on the Development page.
I also released the ClassCreatorBOB - a small utility that adds new classes to the project based on drafts where specific keywords are replaced. Especially useful when adding new components...
The documentation should be (at least partially) updated within this week.

The restructuring of the software took much more time than expected but I took the chance to get rid of some other bad methods as well so that I changed much more than planned.
This version is neither compatible with the previous one nor has it even approcimately its functionality. But since I wanted to keep my promise uploading some English documentation within this months I still made an release with some documentation for it.
The release together with the documentation should at least allow you to create some very simple (passive) simulations and find out if this software is (or will be in reasonable time) of any interest for you.
I will try to release a new version which at least allows the simulation of simple robots again within 1-2 weeks.

Beside a few minor bugfixes I got the xml-file format functional now. This might be interesting for that reason that the next version will have major differences in the file format but converting old xml-files to the new format is much easier than with the sim-(ini)files.

Changed the layout of this homepage by using style sheets.
Removed all not (yet) used functions (forums, trackers, news) from the project page. All information from me will be posted here. If you have any questions just drop me an e-mail.