Simderella 1.1 is available.

From my research in neural networks and robot control a
robot simulator has evolved.  I have been working on and
using this simulator for quite a while now, and suddenly
got prompted to, at last, make it publicly available.  So,
here it is!

Simderella is a robot simulator consisting of three programs:
	connel: the controller
	simmel: the simulator
	bemmel: the X-windows oriented graphics back-end
Simmel is the part which actually simulates the robot.  It
performs a few matrix multiplications, based on the Denavit
Hartenberg method, calculates velocities with the Newton-Euler
scheme, and communicates with the other two programs.  Bemmel
only displays the robot.  It is a fast general-purpose display
method which places separate objects in space depending on
the homogeneous matrices it receives from simmel.  Connel is
the controller, which must be designed by the user (in the
distributed version, connel is a simple inverse kinematics
routine.  I didn't include my neural networks.)

The three programs use Unix sockets for communication.  This
means that
	1. you need sockets
	2. all the programs can run on different machines
Since data communication is high-level (meaning, in this case,
that I do not send doubles, integers, and so on, but encode them
first), running the programs on different architectures is no
problem.  In fact, it was thus designed that connel can, at the
same time, control a real robot _and_ the simulated one.

Simderella likes to sleep; that is, when nothing happens, no
processor time will be used.

The software is available as a compressed tar file called
simderella.1.0.2.tar.Z via anonymous ftp from
galba.mbfys.kun.nl (ip 131.174.82.73), directory 
pub/neuro-software/pd.


Extract the simulator from the tar file by typing
at the Unix command line
	Unix> zcat simderella.1.0.2.tar.Z | tar xf -
or use your favourite extracting commands.
In the simderella/ directory, type
         Unix> make
The sub-directories are recursively visited and executables
are compiled and linked. 

The software has been compiled using gcc on SunOS and Solaris
running under X11R4/5 on Sun3, Sun4, Sun Sparc 1, 2, and 10, and
Silicon Graphics architectures (using cc, of course, which
is what the gnu compiler is called there); it can also
run under Linux.

If you're impatient, execute the thing as follows:
	cd bemmel; Zoscar & cd ..
	cd simmel; source env; simmel1 ns & cd ..
	cd connel; connel s
all on one machine.  Then type commands like
	fix-target 50 50 50
	inverse 50 50 50
or move the mouse pointer in the bemmel window and press an `l' or
`r' or `u' or `d' or ....

						Patrick
