Robot kinematics/dynamics with Blender...

Our colleague Takis Issaris will attend the Blender conference in
Amsterdam this week: 
 <http://www.blender.org/modules/bc2003/conference_program2_03.html>
We are especially interested in finding out what robotics-related
features are already in Blender, what we would like to have in order
to use Blender as the "ultimate" robotics 3D project, and how
difficult it would be to add the missing parts.

So, if you have some concrete questions for Takis, please, let us
know :-)

We have evaluated Blender <www.blender.org> a little bit already, and
here are our "conclusions". Please feel free to add your remarks or
corrections.

- it's _fast_. Especially the start-up time is incredible :-)

- its interface is much different from the commercial robot simulation
  packages. The major difference that I encountered was the almost
  complete absence of the concept of an orthogonal reference frame. I am
  accustomed to build things based on these frames, but Blender doesn't
  have this as the default interface.

- it has support to build kinematics structures: in the post 2.0
  versions, this is done via the "Armature" concept, before it was the
  "IKa". Some introductions can be found here:
  old:
    <http://download.blender.org/documentation/oldsite/oldsite.blender3d.org/139_Blender%20tutorial%20IKA%20basics.html>
    <http://www.lysator.liu.se/~torkel/graphix/blender/ikman.html>
  new:
    <http://members.lycos.co.uk/kurppa/blender/ik.html>
    <http://www.dm7.net/index.php?page=tutorials/animtools.html>
    <http://blenderchar.weirdhat.com/handtute/>

- its dynamics engine is AFAIK based on "particle dynamics", i.e.,
  simulating the dynamics of a jointed robot structure involves the
  calculation of the "restoring forces" in each joint. This could be
  improved, using the more efficient robotics algorithms.

- it has Python-based scripting, so potentially easy extendibility...

- it has support for "key framing" animation. (But none of the robotics
  trajectory generation algorithms.)

- it has a seemingly advanced rendering engine on board, so making
  nice pictures will be easy.

Maybe you know of better "Blender+robotics" tutorials? Or are interested
in putting some student projects on this? Or you know other promising
free software packages that could do the same or more, with the
advantage of having a large user and developers base to hook in into?
I'm interested in these things too, so let's work together :-)

Herman
-- 
  K.U.Leuven, Mechanical Engineering, Robotics Research Group
<http://people.mech.kuleuven.ac.be/~bruyninc> Tel: +32 16 322480