Some recent improvements to RoboGen

[Joshua Auerbach]

Hi everyone,

I want to let you know about some big recent improvements to RoboGen
that I have just pushed to the master branch on github

(1) Physics optimizations: I have made some major optimizations to the
simulator, which drastically increase the speed of simulation especially
for complex morphologies. This primarily involved removing all fixed
joints from the system and instead dynamically merging geometries into
composite bodies. This means you should now be able to carry out
evolutionary experiments much faster (or equivalently carry out much
larger scale experiments in the same amount of time). I won't get into
more details here, but if you want to know more about how exactly this
works then ask and I will be happy to explain.

(2) Support for newer versions of ODE: previously we would sometimes see
a bug when using versions of ODE more recent than 0.12. I have now
fixed this problem, and have tested it with 0.13.1

I encourage all of you to pull the latest changes and report any bugs
that you might encounter.

Finally I will mention that the official github repository for RoboGen
has been moved from my personal account to the one of the LIS. The new
url is https://github.com/lis-epfl/robogen But, if you had checked out
RoboGen from the old url, do not worry as this will be automatically
redirected, and you should not have to change anything.

Happy evolving!

Josh

--
Dr. Joshua E. Auerbach
Postdoctoral Researcher
Laboratory of Intelligent Systems
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

[Joshua Auerbach]

Just a small clarification. If you pull the latest changes you will
need to rerun CMake before recompiling so that it discovers some new
source files that have created.

Best,
Josh