Robotics executives who want to tap into a growing talent pool of developers should check out this Website for the Multi Open Robots Simulator Engine (MORSE). It’s an open source project to create a simulation tool for multirobot operations, such as units within a factory, farm, or mine. Another facet of the project centers on enhancing human robotic interactions within a closed environment. A voice recognition-enabled, home-based intelligent agent that controls robot floor sweepers, media equipment, and other household appliances might be an example application.
As you can read on the site, MORSE’s France-based developers hope to tie their application to popular existing robotic platforms such as Willow Garage’s Robotic Operating System (ROS) and Yarp. MORSE itself is just one of several robotics projects that are offshoots of the well-established open source game engine Blender.
These efforts are far enough along to have their own wiki on the Blender Website. And as the wiki’s organizers note, game engines have a lot in common with robotic simulators. Both allow autonomous avatars to be placed in a virtual environment where they react to physics principles of that environment. And the underlying physics engines (Blender is integrated with the Bullet Physics engine) are intended to mimic real-world effects such as gravity and the malleability of materials. Also, Blender and other game engines enable non-player characters-or in the case of robotics, the term might be avatars-to interact with one another as well as human characters.
Other efforts to integrate robotics with video game engines exist, or course. Autodesk, for example, is heavily involved in both areas. Do a quick Google search and you’ll find a dozens of academic papers on the topic.
All of which brings me back to my original point, finding talent. The video game industry is ripe with it. The people with the imagination to construct Halo’s stark metallic corridors would be just as able to produce real-world factory floors and hospital hallways. And they are just as liable to be found in Southern California and Vancouver as they are in Amsterdam and Odessa. Set these people to work developing robotic applications using a game engine they’ve grown accustomed to using and who knows what they might come up with!
