MORSE, the OpenRobot Simulator

Main features

• A versatile simulator for generic mobile robots simulation (single or multi robots),
• Enabling realistic and dynamic environments (with other interacting agents -humans- or objects),
• Don't reinvent the wheel: critical components reused from other opensource projects (Blender for 3D rendering + physical simulation + UI, dedicated robotic middlewares for communications + robot hardware support),
• Seamless workflow: since the simulator rely on Blender for both modelling and the realtime 3D engine, creating and modifying a simulated scene is straigthforward.
• Entierely scriptable in Python,
• Adaptable to various level of simulation realism (for instance, we may want to simulate exteroceptive sensors like cameras in certain cases and access directly to a higher level representation of the world -like labelled artifacts- in other cases),

• Currently compatible with YARP and LAAS OpenRobots robotics frameworks,

• Fully open source, BSD-compatible.

Documentation

• Morse's web pages

• User's guide

• Developer's guide

Videos

Videos are availables online on vimeo

Source code

• Morse's page on Github

Road Map

The first release of MORSE contains only a subset of the final simulator specification.

Amongst the planned features:

• Support for arms simulation, based on inverse kinematics. This has been separately developped by the Leuven's university and will be merge into MORSE over the next releases,
• Raw sockets interface + full compatiblity with the ROS robotics framework (other robotics framework are planned as well. Let us know if you want to contribute in this area),
• Developement of the user interface,
• Scalablity (both in term of simulation capacity and ease of deployment),
• Multi-node simulations (several Blender nodes can be started on several computer and automaticaly synchronise, which should allow simulations of tenth of robots in the same scene),
• Dedicated supervision node that would allow to: observe the simulation, display logs and metrics, start/stop robots, dynamically alter the scene (like moving an obstacle in front of a robot, etc.).