The pendulum method will either learn to bounce, or rotate for a few seconds before coming to a stop.
I wonder what inputs the network is using. Are velocity and rotation being used as input?
The pendulum method will either learn to bounce, or rotate for a few seconds before coming to a stop.
I wonder what inputs the network is using. Are velocity and rotation being used as input?
5 years ago(+1)
Super interesting idea! The help page in the sim (question mark on the left of the building UI) describes the inputs that the brain uses - and since I have it up, here's the list:
- Distance of creature from the ground
- Current velocity (horizontal and vertical component)
- Rotational velocity
- Number of points currently touching the ground
- Creature's rotation (= the average of all bone rotations)
At least, this is what it generally uses. It also specifies that it may use more inputs based on the task (obstacle jumping uses another input for the distance between the creature and the obstacle).
One other thing is that it says there's two parts to being able to perform a task - how the body is built and how the brain controls that body. It would be nice if there could be a "manual" mode where you can somehow manually control the creature to test whether its given body is even capable of achieving such speeds...but I realize this could be complicated to use, esp if the number of muscles is high.
5 years ago(+1)
Yeah. I found that input list shortly after posting this. I'm wondering if somehow that average bone rotation is resulting in a static rotation value on a creature like this. Depending on how the rotation of a single bone is determined, it seems like a wheel's average may just cancel itself out. If that's the case, then:
- distance from the ground is always the same
- current velocity has no direct correlation to current rotation, and may actually cause more harm than good
- rotational velocity has the same problems as current velocity
- number of points touching will always be the same
And we end up with no usable inputs.
It would be cool if there was an input list to select from, so that we could fine tune the creature's "senses", including multiple variants on rotation input, or even tying some of the inputs to a property of a specific bone or muscle.