Simulating without graphics

I’m doing a MEng dissertation on machine learning for mobile robot fleet management, and need a way of simulating a factory environment for a machine learning task. I have access Visual Components, but have never used it before. I was just wondering if it is possible to simulate without the use of a graphical interface to allow for faster than real-time simulation to use with a machine learning algorithm?

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If you just want number-crunching, make everything invisible in 3D world and/or blockify all geometry, and then click Gear icon in Simulation player to access simulation settings. In the Settings menu, change the Run Mode to Virtual Time, which allows you to run the simulation as fast as your CPU is capable of doing.

If you are using statistics, consider creating one or more charts in the dashboard, e.g. for utilization of AGV and path distance. The “Matrix Milling Factory” demo layout in our eCatalog library is a good starting point for this approach. Why? It allows you to get immediate feedback during simulation or at regular intervals based on the sampling rate, and then you could export that data to CSV file or Excel.

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That’s exactly what I’m looking for, thanks!

Hello,

I don’t have the legend value and time, and there is no indicator of the unity in the statistics… How should I do to have them?

thanks

@kbqhs It’s been over a year, so maybe the layout changed. The legend and time are chart properties.

Do this:

  1. Click a chart shown in the Statistics dashboard.
  2. Go to the Properties panel. It will display the properties of the selected chart.
  3. There should be properties for turning on/off the visibility of the legend and time/x-axis label, so check those to see them displayed on the chart.
See 5:05 http://academy.visualcomponents.com/lessons/report-statistics/

Hello,

although this thread is pretty old I’m interested here if you have achieved this type of simualtion.
Could you share some results?

Thanks!

If you dock a panel to the same pane as 3D viewport and that panel is the selected panel in the tab group while the simulation is running then the 3D viewport should not be rendering anything. Note that some panels are restricted from docking with 3D viewport/window, but there is API available to make your panel for such a case. That is one option, but it of course is not a headless solution.