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User Interface |
The user interface of SimRobot has been designed to allow as much visualization and interaction as possible, as well as to be flexible enough to handle simulations of any different kind of environments. Therefore a tree of all objects of the scene is the starting point for all user operations. Each node of that tree may be selected to open a view for that kind of object. In case of actuators (e. g. a hinge joint), a control for direct manipulation is opened. For sensors, several different visualization modes are implemented. Through this concept, it is also possible to open several views of arbitrary subsets of the scene graph. These views offer a zoom, rotation, panning and different grades of detail as well as the possibility to switch between the appearance and the physical model of single objects. Furthermore, it is possible to interactively drag and drop and rotate objects inside the scene or to apply a momentum to an object (e. g. to let a ball roll). This is quite useful to arrange different settings while testing e. g. a robot behavior. To add own views to a scene, an interface for user-defined views has been implemented which enables the definition of own debug drawings from inside the controller. Other elements of the user interface are an editor for the scene description files and a console for text output from the controller.
Main Window of SimRobot contains following elements: