Movement creation and sharing...

Hi,

As mentioned before I’ve been working on the new site for the next judoka
competition (http://roboka.org). Now the site more or less finished I can focus
again on creating useful tools for the competitors. The goal I set my self is to
produce a movement creation tool witch enables competitors to easily create, use
and share their movements. The base lines are already defined and I would
greatly appreciate some collaboration and remarks from all of you and especially
Xavier (Kubiak). I will not give the full spec yet, but I want to present the
basic Idea. My project is composed of three main parts:


1.	Movement definition

I’m trying to create a very general usable Motion java object. The idea is to
have a movement defined by a list of key-frames (position/time couples) for each
servo involved in the movement. Once the motion object created, each time the
motion will be used it has to be initialised (MyMotion.init(int time) where time
is the start time) and can then be used by sending the actual time to it. The
main program fully controls the movement and can choose to abort it a any time
(The object only returns the servo values but doesn’t send them to the servos).
There will be other feature but I don’t want to go to far in details. I am
thinking of defining a Java Interface witch these motion objects have to follow
so if people are not happy with my implementation of the interpolation etc. they
can just do it by themselves.


2.	File sharing using XML.

This part is greatly inspired by the wiki contribution done by Albathor for the
last year’s competition. The idea is to define the motion object described in
point 1. in a separate human readable xml file witch will be parsed at the
launch of the controller. The parser I have almost finished will create the
motion objects, which can then be accessed by the controllers. The xml file will
look something like this:

<Motion name=”standup” loop=”1”>

back_one   			.1	.2	 0
back_oneFrameNumber		0	40	50

back_two			0	.5	.3
back_twoFrameNumber		0	70	120

left_hip_one		   	0
left_hip_oneFrameNumber		0

left_hip_two		    	0
left_hip_twoFrameNumber		0

left_hip_three  	    	0	.4
left_hip_threeFrameNumber  	0	20

</Motion>

<Motion name=”attack”>
…
…

</Motion>

The goal is to enable the sharing of movements between competitors. For example
someone might decide to post the stand up movement on the wiki. New competitors
will then be able to use it without having to spend days (weeks?) coding. This
will hopefully speed up the evolution of all competitors and increase the
accessibility of the competition.


3.	Mouvement creation Interface

The motion interface created by Xavier (Kubiak) and posted on the wiki for last
years competition has many excellent features and seems to me a great approach
for easy creation of motions. My goal is to use this interface to create the xml
file defining motions (see point 2). This way, motions could be loaded/created
directly from the movement creation tool and later used by the controllers
without needing to code anything.


For this project I would specially need the collaboration of Xavier. I heard
from Olivier you have a new version of your Motion creation Tool. I am wondering
to witch degree you would like to combine your efforts with mine (any interest
in this project?), and if I may use your code to contribute to the competition.

I am also relying on all of you to get some feedback/ideas from experienced
competitors about my project and ideas. I am open to any critiks and remarks (Is
any body interested in these standards/tools?). Keep in mind these tools should
help you and new competitors not just decorate the web sit :-).


To all of you who made it to the end of this mail: congratulations and thanks
for the interest

Jean-Philippe




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