Crowd dynamics

[hawesie]

To make long-term patrolling in simulation more effective, it would be great to have people in the simulation. If anyone is able to start implementing this, please claim this issue ;)

[marc-hanheide]

We have a PhD student who is actually doing research on this, mainly to create believable crowd movements in games. But he expressed interest to get this working in robot simulations as well. I'll try to get an update from him.

[kunzel]

That would be nice @marc-hanheide. I did a quick test with the human character and a waypoint actuator. Thereby, it is possible to send the human avatar to a waypoint via the socket interface. It should be relatively simple to get some human-looking moving obstacles.

Add the following to the MORSE build script:

human = Human()
human.use_world_camera()
waypoint = Waypoint() # create actuator
waypoint.add_interface('socket') # control via sockets
human.append(waypoint)

Start a telnet session: telnet localhost 4000

Send a command: id1 human.waypoint goto [1.0,1.0, 0.0, 0.5, 1.0]

where [1.0,1.0, 0.0, 0.5, 1.0] are x, y, z, tolerance, speed.

[marc-hanheide]

Cool, I'll tell him it's that simple, but he'd need to know the map of the environment, too... Anyway, good!

[hawesie]

:+1:

[kunzel]

I just saw that there is also a Pose2D ROS interface for the waypoint actuator. Maybe he could use the nav_goals_generator (https://github.com/strands-project/strands_utils/tree/master/nav_goals_generator) to generate a number of random 2D poses in the overall map or a particular region of interest. However, the generated random poses are in map frame whereas the waypoint actuator uses MORSE's world frame. This mapping between the two needs to be done.

[hawesie]

We also have a PRM generator for ROS which could be used for some structured waypoints: https://github.com/uobirlab/map_view

[cburbridge]

Did anyone ever make any progress with this?

[marc-hanheide]

sorry, my student interrupted (he works for Intel and they didn't approve him doing this...)