Chapter 6: The BeeSoft Simulator™
In This Chapter...
You’ll learn how to use the BeeSoft Simulator™, the program that lets you simulate robot motion and sensing without using an actual robot. Although great care has been taken to make the BeeSoft Simulator as realistic and accurate as possible, it is still no substitute for actually working with a real, physical robot.
The BeeSoft Simulator offers an easy-to-use graphical user interface and is a valuable learning and research tool. It’s especially nice for those occasions when you have some programming magic you just have to try, but somebody else in your lab is hogging the robot!
The BeeSoft Simulator is a multi-window system, based on the use of multiple xterm windows. It is designed for use with either a BeeSoft-supplied demonstration program such as wander or with an example program of your own devising. The buttons on the graphical interface display are designed for the construction of simulated environments, through which your demonstration program, or wander, can navigate the simulated robot.
If you are using a UNIX™ system that does NOT have BeeSoft pre-installed, see the Reference sections in the back of this Manual that tell you, 1) how to set up your environment to run BeeSoft; and 2) how to install BeeSoft.
The BeeSoft Simulator™ is a fully-supported utility package, supplied as part of BeeSoft™ to assist you in your robotic research and development activities.
To run the BeeSoft Simulator™, you need a working knowledge of the X-Window System, and you need to have the X-Window System up and running on your workstation. RWI, Inc., does not recommend, and will not support, running X-Windows on your robot.
