Technical description

Revolve contains:

• classes for creating specifications of body parts
• classes to build robot bodies and neural networks
• world manager class that interacts with gazebo simulator (revolve.gazebo.manage.WorldManager class)
• classes for crossover and mutator operations
• utility functions (converter, logger)

The related library sdfbuilder.

Gazebo plugins

Revolve also comes with a number of Gazebo plugins to power the defined components in simulation. The RobotController C++ class is a solid basis for controlling a robot in a simple manner, providing default implementations of motor controllers and sensor readers with an interface over the body parts' inputs and outputs.

Robot Controlles

World Controlles

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WorldManager communicates with gazebo using protobuf messages.

example (pausing the world):

manager = pygazebo.connect(address)
publisher = manager.advertise('/gazebo/default/world_control', 'gazebo.msgs.WorldControl')
publisher.wait_for_listener()

msg = pygazebo.msg.world_control_pb2.WorldControl()
msg.pause = True
publisher.publish(msg)

Tol-Revolve extends revolve for triangle-of-life experiments.

Tol-revolve contains:

• World class extending revolve.gazebo.manage.WorldManager
• Builder functions that use revolve.build.sdf.RobotBuilder to create an sdf object representing a robot.
• logging functions
• specifications of body parts

Robot brains

Of course you would like your robot to also have a brain. Revolve also ships with a specification for a simple neural network, with its interface based on a robot body if desired.

Revolve.Angle

The most complete, but opinionated part of Revolve is Angle, which is a framework that allows specification, generation and evolution of robots that fit within the defined body space and have a neural network as a brain. See the information in the revolve.angle folder for details.

TODO

Given a working Gazebo installation, Revolve can be compiled using cmake followed by make also. The easiest way to use the Python libraries right now is by using pip install -e /path/to/revolve. I'll update these instructions with more details as soon as I find the time.