Re: [simspark-devel] New touch sensor

[Joschka B. <jbo...@un...>]

Hi Hedayat,

Hedayat Vatankhah wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I finished writing the base structure of a new touch perceptor and I'm 
> going to commit my code to CVS (is it wrong to to this at this stage?!).
>

Great!

> As a beginner, I've tried to make the minimum possible changes in the 
> existing sources. I've added two new classes to the collisionperceptor 
> library: TouchPerceptorHandler & ExtendedTouchPerceptor(Sorry if the 
> names are too bad! I can't find good choices for now, any suggestions 
> are highly appreciated!!).
>

How about ForceResistancePerceptor instead of ExtendedTouchPerceptor? 
There are actual sensors for robots called force resistance sensor (FRS) 
and they measure pretty much the same thing as your perceptor :-)

>
> TouchPerceptorHandler is an extension to ContactJointHandler. It 
> should be used instead of the ContactJointHandler and no extra handler 
> (PerceptorHandler) is needed.(In fact I think it should be merged with 
> the ContactJointHandler class)
>

After a test phase, we should consider to merge the two then.

>
> Currently, the ExtendedTouchPerceptor provides each contact point 
> (global coordinates of the collision) and the forceapplied to the 
> body. Each object can have up to three contact points with each object 
> (when two surfaces are completely in touch). We have accessto the 
> force and torque which is applied to the body at each contact point.
>
>
> Providing all of the contact point (which should be in local 
> coordinates) will increase flexibility, but it'll make the output much 
> longer. Instead of this, we could provide a kind of average force 
> applied to the whole part.
>
>
> Now, what is the desired output? Please answer!
>

Since we are trying to decrease output to the agents to a minimum 
currently, I would propose to output the average of the force vector 
magnitudes. What do you think?

Cheers,
Joschka