| Hello, You are asking about the FAQs here:
https://www.polymathrobotics.com/product We are actually a hardware and real robots company first! Our simulator efforts are for two purposes:
1. Allow more people to try out our autonomy core, and build on top of our API
2. Allow our own developers to run testing and tuning in sim. To your point, we don't expect tuning to purely happen in sim. However, we did have our senior controls engineer just recently tune up a controller in sim for Caladan, and later deploy practically the same thing to the real vehicle, leading to much smoother steering commands. We'll write about that in detail in the future. Our work is to ensure that API commands that are sent in sim, behave as close to identically as possible on real vehicles, thereby allowing people who build on top of us to focus on higher level software stack (business logic layer, etc). Hence, users of our API don't need to have any robotics experience, they simply command the vehicle to do something, and we ensure it gets done. (and our team is comprised of perception, controls, ML, etc engineers) The details of how this is done will be a future writeup, but the summary is that we pass sensors through a Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL), along with kinematic/dynamic configuration and data about the vehicle. This allows the global and local planners to plan for a more generic vehicle (ex: Ackermann steering vs differential steering), while the HAL ensures that the planners don't generate unfeasible or unsafe commands. Let me know if the above answers your questions! |