Idea: scenery support

[mhoffman]

Problem statement: simulating and testing a drone ability to avoid obstacles and navigate constrained spaces requires some way to input a scenery geometry.

Proposed solution: use a Blender inspired format for representing boxes (origin + half_extents).
More sophisticated geometries (trees, other primitives and dynamic objects may follow later)

Example for input format below

apartment.yaml

[peterkrull]

This is a good idea.

I imagine we could make it so that the simulation is able to load one or more "scene" files containing this sort of geometry. Is the apartment.yaml file directly exported from blender? If so, it would make sense to be able to load that format directly.

It should not be too challenging, since Rapier and Rerun both support creating basic cubes, and a serde-compatible library should make converting the yaml file into Rust types fairly easy as well.

I think the main challenge is to create the abstraction that ensures the geometry is present in both the simulator and Rerun. That might just be a matter of deciding on a good and flexible format (or using an existing one) for loading these geometry descriptions in the test binary, and then passing those descriptions along to rerun and the simulator where we iterate over each piece of geometry, and take an appropriate action based on the type of geometry.

It this something you would be open to work on?

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In the long run, it would probably make sense to break holsatus-sim into its own crate if it becomes a viable simulation engine. Currently it is pretty much just a "minimum viable product" to have something lightweight and easy to use, so it is fairly limited overall