TABLE OF CONTENTS Even though the final goal of bio-inspired control is to perform experiments on robots and to build neuromorphic chips, software tools and general frameworks to validate the approach and the control scheme have been developed in order to conceive a development system as a new tool to design bio-inspired robots. In this appendix a brief description of a dynamic simulator of the hexapod robot, called HexaDyn, and a general framework, called CNNLab, in which the bio-inspired control system is implemented via software on a PC driving the real robot through the parallel port, is given.
HexaDyn was developed starting from the libraries of DynaMechs, a software package in C++ including efficient dynamic simulation algorithms for multiple chain robotic systems, available as an open source [McMillan (1994); McMillan et. at. (1996)]. Real-time simulation and a realistic 3-D graphical display are the great advantages of this software package. On the other hand the package, being distributed as an open source, is not user-friendly. The main classes of DynaMechs were used to build an efficient framework in which to simulate the bio-inspired hexapod robot. The classes of DynaMechs were been used to design and simulate the mechanical part of the system, while new classes have been written for the bio-inspired control. The latter include classes for the simulation of the CNN-based CPG, the Motor Maps and many of the other control schemes discussed in this book.
HexaDyn allows the possibility of controlling...
