Starting point for simulating a car

[dp118m]

Hi!

I'm completely new to V-REP. I have the idea of using it in order to develop components for cars without having a real car.

Imagine I want to build a simulation with following features:

• There is a car as well as several obstacles (e. g. walls, potholes, elevations of the terrain).
• I can control whether the car moves or not, with what speed and in what direction using a program (ideally - in Java, but any other language will do).
• If the car bumps into an obstacle, my program is informed about this.

I know there at least two car models in the default V-REP package (naked Ackermann vehicle and the Mantra with differential).

What is the best starting point (e. g. tutorial) for implementing the simulation described above?

Thanks

Dmitri Pisarenko

[SagiCZ]

I think you should read a documentation about how the scene works, how to add dynamic joints and how to import geometry. This will allow you to set up a working car in V-REP which you can control through child scripts. Once that's done, you can connect to the remote API server with your Java client and control the car using V-REP signals.
If you want to detecect hitting an obstacle, you can probably attach some handler to collision detection but more simplistic approach might be to check some accelerometer data attached to the car.

I am sorry to not the exact links for documentation but I am sure you can find them around here.

[dp118m]

SagiCZ, many thanks for your answer.