[ros-users] Announcing MORSE 1.0

[Séverin Lemaignan]

Dear ROS community,

After 4 years of worldwide development by over 20 people in 10 different 
labs, we are extremely excited to announce the immediate availability of 
MORSE-1.0, a novel versatile simulator for academic robotics, with full 
ROS support.

Amongst the prominent features:

   * Versatile 3D simulator for mobile robots simulation (single or 
multi robots),

   * Realistic ('modern' OpenGL) and dynamic environments (interaction 
with other agents like humans or objects),

   * Based on well known and widely adopted open source projects 
(Blender for real-time 3D rendering, Bullet for physics simulation, 
dedicated robotic middlewares for communications),

   * Command-line oriented (with optional scene editing in Blender), 
entirely scriptable in Python,

   * Adaptable to various level of simulation abstraction (e.g. simulate 
cameras as video-streams, depth-streams or semantic maps depending on 
your needs),

   * > 20 classes of sensors (including depth sensors, cameras, IMU, 
laser scanners...), > 15 classes of actuators (including kinematic 
chains, quadrirotor control, force control...) are available. Detailed 
documentation explain how to add new ones (in C or Python),

   * Currently supports ROS, YARP, MOOS and Pocolibs + direct socket 
interface

   * Extensive documentation, available here:
	http://www.openrobots.org/morse/doc/stable/morse.html

And as a collaborative academic project, the source code is available 
under a permissive BSD license. Grab your copy from 
http://www.github.com/laas/morse !


Last but not least, Michael and Pierrick will be present at ROSCon in 
May to present the project. Feel free to pop-up to meet the team!

Cheers!
Séverin, for the MORSE team