Other Controllers

Random thought:  physical simulation is by far the slowest part in ELSE.  Implicit integration would both speed things up nicely and help stabilize it numerically, reducing the number of checks and so speeding it up further.  But implicit methods don't like impluse-style forces like collisions.

 

So what about flying and swimming behaviors?  They've been done a bit, but not so well.  I'm not sure about the trade-offs, but I'm thinking about a fluid simulation to evolve bird or insect flight controllers.  This would be interesting because, 1) as far as I know, insect flight is still difficult to understand by analysis, 2) implicit fluids would be stable and reasonably fast (wonder what the Korean evolved flight team used for a physics model?), 3) it might be visually impressive: large birds due to grace and small insects due to the strangeness of flight technique.  Though insects, esp, might rely on far too subtle fluid properties (say, micro vortices) that wouldn't be tractable to simulate naively.

 

I don't know much about fluids outside of reading Jos Stam's papers from Siggraph.  It'd be critical to get realistic forces acting on the wing surfaces from the fluid; not sure if the current fast fluid sys techniques do that much.