MORSE, the essential ingredient to bring your robot to real life

European Robotics Forum (ERF)
Västerås, Sweden
April 8, 8h30-10h00

Organisers

• Gilberto Echeverria (LAAS/CNRS) gechever (at) laas (dot) fr
  Koen Buys (KUL) Koen (dot) Buys (at) mech (dot) kuleuven (dot) be
  Michael Karg (TUM) kargm (at) in (dot) tum (dot) de
  

Motivations

The Modular Open Robots Simulation Engine (MORSE) is a software developed across several European labs with the aim of using Blender in robotics research. This new simulator is planned as an open source tool that can be used to test the robot software before it is deployed in a real robot. MORSE is designed to be as flexible as possible, and to this end it has the following characteristics:

• Completely modular: users can choose from a library of components (robots, sensors, actuators) to replicate any type of robot
• Middleware independent: it can be configured to use a variety of robotics middlewares (currently YARP, ROS, Pocolibs, and Sockets)
• Adjustable levels of realism: various components can perform tasks of higher or lower abstraction level, depending on the needs of the user

Objectives

To demonstrate and disseminate the MORSE simulator, by means of showing the applications in which it is currently used in various robotics labs in Europe. To present a practical workshop in which people interested can have a hands on experience using the MORSE simulator

Agenda

• Presentation of version 0.3 of the MORSE simulator
• Demonstration of current capabilities and use in various labs
  • LAAS: Multi robot navigation and Human-Robot interaction
  • KUL: Presentation of the GUI for scene creation
  • TUM: ROS middleware and example scenarios using ROS navigation stack, GMapping and/or TF
• Tutorial on getting started with MORSE
  • Basic setup
  • Creation and configuration of a new scenario

Desired results

• To inform the robotics community of the capabilities of the simulator
• To get more labs to use the simulator
• To interest people in contributing to the development of MORSE

Requisites for participating in the Workshop

If you are interested in participating in the tutorial on the use of MORSE, it will be very helpful to have MORSE installed in your computer.

• Instructions on downloading and installing MORSE can be found at
  

http://www.openrobots.org/morse/doc/stable/user/installation.html.

• A simple tutorial to get started using MORSE can be found at
  

http://www.openrobots.org/morse/doc/stable/user/tutorial.html.

• MORSE uses realistic graphics to simulate test environments. It requires a powerful computer with a recent graphics card. The best compatibility is obtained when using Nvidia graphics cards.

• MORSE is built on top of the Blender 3D graphics application. It is very important to be familiar with Blender's interface to make the most out of MORSE. Canon EOS 60D 18-55 Tutorials on the use of Blender can be found here:
  http://www.blendercookie.com/getting-started-with-blender/

Planned follow ups

There is a community of users and developers for the MORSE platform. You can subscribe to the corresponding mailing lists by following these links:

• Users list: morse-users (at) laas (dot) fr

• Developers list: morse-dev (at) laas (dot) fr

Further activities will be published on these lists, as well as the official website for the project.

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