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  ArchR Usage

Demo video

Inspiration

Physics simulation is a topic that members had experience with and actively enjoyed to work with it. A key inspiration for this program was a game called PolyBridge, where you get to create your own bridge, but it's your job to find a structure to prevent collapsing on itself. We decided to take that idea and flip it around. The user is the one who draws the path and the program figures out the supports.

What it does

ArchR allows a user to draw a bridge path and the program determines what supporting structure is required to prevent the bridge from collapsing. It does so by adding supports in strategic locations until the bridge is stable. The addition of supports is done iteratively, and each addition and its subsequent simulation is shown visually to the user to be able to see the evolution in real time.

How we built it

We used python for all the physics simulation and logic and pygame for making the app interactive and allowing the user to see the result evolve in front of their eyes.

Challenges we ran into

The bridge occasionally exploded. Furthermore, physics simulations are somewhat... unstable at times... Generating a bridge out of some 0's and 1's was a ubiquitous task. As a result, the program can sometimes behave in unexpected ways during edge cases.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We made good compromises on our ideas to still maximize the effectiveness if it. For example, we planned on exporting the bridge model to blender, but time constraints prevented us to finish it in time. We're also proud that we kept our AI usage at a minimum. We only used it occasionally to point out the bugs, lead to better optimized ideas/code and added comments (which we fully reviewed) to make our code easier to understand in the ending moments of the competition. The majority (95%+) of our code is organic, AKA human-written.

What we learned

We learned that building bridge simulations is hard. You have to take account tension, string force, sway, etc. In other words, plenty of variables. We also learned how to draw simulation in pygame.

What's next for ArchR

Completing our export to a 3d model with Blender feature would be a great place to start. This ability would give users a better visualization of the bridge's structure.

Built With

• pygame
• python