Visualizing Soft Bodied Robotics Simulations with Modern Rendering Techniques

Soft body robotics is a promising emerging field. These robots have the potential to adapt to damage by learning how to move their flexible forms in more versatile ways than conventional robots. An important portion of this research is simulation, which provides the ability to investigate emergent behaviors without physically damaging the robot and with faster trial execution then real time trials. Professor Rieffel investigates these behaviors with Voxcraft, a two-part software which simulates and visualizes the motion of soft body cells called voxels. While the simulator is robust, the visualizer lacks modern lighting techniques, textures, and rendering systems. My research involved parsing the history files from the voxcraft simulator and extracting their pertinent information to Blender. Voxcraft history files contain information on a series of cubes, called voxels, across a series of frames. Together, the location and rotation data across these frames encodes the animation data. Recreating the simulation in Blender, an open-source CAD software, enables images of the animation to be rendered with Blender’s cycles engine, which provides higher resolution and fidelity then the voxcraft visualizer. The end goal of this research is the development of a stable Blender plugin which enables history files to be easily imported into Blender to be visualized. It is important to visualize the results of research well as properly presented data increases the credibility of the research and makes it more appealing to a wider audience.