Yeah, after giving it some thought, it would be very tough to repurpose a realtime physics simulator like PhysX or ODE to be useful to Anybots. But that doesn't

Yeah, after giving it some thought, it would be very tough to repurpose a realtime physics simulator like PhysX or ODE to be useful to Anybots. But that doesn't necessarily mean that it isn't practical to create a simulator suited for rapid prototyping of robots. (I'm just brainstorming ideas in the rest of this post; I'm not sure whether they'll work, but it's a fun problem to think about.) Perhaps it would be useful to write your own simulator that incorporates data about how the components of the robot behave in the real world, to get a more accurate simulation. By that I mean, the problem is that the robot model has so much complexity that it's difficult to simulate accurately. So instead of creating a mathematical model for how a compressed-air actuator behaves, for example, gather real-world data about how it actually behaves in the robot, then incorporate that data into the simulator. I mean, if the robot is walking slowly on a flat surface, then its individual components behave in the same ways each time the robot takes a step forward, right? Therefore it seems like the behavior of the whole robot can be reproduced and predicted in a simulator, since the behavior of each component is known (under controlled conditions, like when the robot is walking slowly). Brute force the problem by using large amounts of real-world data, is what I'm getting at.