iRobert is a powerful exploration vehicule specially built for Mars. It has never been easier to explore Mars before iRobert. And it is so cute that you will expect him to blink its eyes!
iRobert is made 100% of high quality pixels. It has been built in the pure tradition of openGL and glut, while adding exciting features, as moving the arm and sending signals to the Earth.
Driving on the red planet
iRobert features in standard 4 wheels, 2 of them motorized to make it turns. The tyres are one of the best of their class, allowing the vehicle to stick to the terrain. You will never slip any more! The robot will follow the height of the terrain, and even tilt according to the slope. With very simple controls, drive it wherever you want!
Interacting
with environment
The fully functional (1) arm can rotate aroung its main axis, and the hand can rotate, loosen or tight objects. Thanks to the solar energy and the battery that ships with iRobert, you can use the arm anytime, anywhere.
Visual rendering
3 rendering modes, avalaible through the keyboard or a menu, can be chosen:
Wireframe. This presents all the details of the scene in
the most simplest way. While it is not the most realistic rendering, it
is still a get debuging tool!
Flat
Shading. This mode combine a flat shading rendering, with one computed
normal by polygon.
Smooth
Shading. This mode provides a very good visual rendering. It has
one computed normal per vertex, and still run at realtime (2)
on the in1 Sun machines.
And two views are available: one camera follows iRobert, while another is at a fixed place.
Terrain
The terrain is built from a grayscale height map. At load time of the application,
the image file is read and interpreted to be rendered fully textured. To
achieve best performances, the terrain is a glList.
- Actually, grabbing objects is not implemented.
- Realtime means >20 frames/sec at 640x480 resolution. Based on our estimation.
Space Rocket!