Hello! I’m documenting my master’s thesis journey publicly. The main reason is simple: I want to keep track of my progress and stay accountable, especially since I tend to procrastinate. Writing things down also helps me organize my thoughts and reflect on what I’m learning.
First of all, my thesis is a simple robotics simulator that runs on ROS2 and interfaces with my job’s cognitive architecture.
First Idea
My first idea was to use an open-source, well-documented simulator. The problem is that one doesn’t exist, not even for ROS2. To be fair, there are a couple of examples that inspired me.
Building from “scrath”
Yes, it’s kind of a custom simulator with a lot of features that I need, so the easiest way is to start from scratch. But that’s not totally true. I will use MuJoCo and Gymnasium as the cornerstone of my simulator.
The world model generator
The world model generator is one of the most important requirements for the simulator. But what is a world model? In simple terms, it’s the map in Mujoco. For example, a kitchen is a world model. Since everyone needs a world to live in, I started generating one. Also, my idea is to use YAML files to generate diverse world models without changing the Python code. Oh right, I’m using Python as the programming language.
That’s all for today. I’m a little rusty. I’ll try to write more in my next post. :)