[emb] Evolved virtual flight

[Tim Taylor]

Dear all,

I was recently contacted by a student from the University
of Korea, Jeff Y. Shim, who has been experimenting with
evolved virtual creatures (using the ODE physics simulator).
Jeff has got some nice examples of evolved flight on his
webpage - as far as I am aware, these are the first examples
of this kind.  It's not an accurate model of aerodynamics -
as far as I understand, it is basically just a variation
of the fluid simulation for evolved swimming, with the
addition of gravity.  The creatures are constructed
from articulated sticks with rigid sheets in between.
Despite the simplicity, some of the examples look
surprisingly realistic.

You can see Jeff's work at http://163.152.44.229/research.htm

Be warned, though, some of the movies are very large -
here are the filesizes:
     29855744 Air1.avi
     13574144 Air2.avi
     47804416 Air3.avi (47MB!)
     34953216 Air4.avi
     18946048 Air5.avi
      4892672 Air6.avi
      3700736 Air7.avi
      9637888 Air8.avi

Air6,7 & 8 are all good examples and relatively small
downloads.  Air4 & 5 and very nice movies with good
rendering of ground and sky as well.

Tim

Tim Taylor_____________________________________|office:   Room C6
Research Fellow, Mobile Robots Group, IPAB     |tel:0131-651-1740
mail address: School of Informatics,           |fax:0131-650-6899
University of Edinburgh, 5 Forrest Hill, Edinburgh, EH1 2QL, U.K.
http://www.dai.ed.ac.uk/homes/timt/    mailto:tim.taylor at ed.ac.uk