Thanks, Jay for your so positive characteristic of Valter. It’s really important for me. Most of people who knows me and Valter tells exactly the same - time will pretty soon solve the problem with fear of Valter, and moreover will help to eliminate such a problem with my younger son (he is now 1 y.o.).
Thanks to my wife, she understands how important is what I’m doing for our children in future in terms of motivation and positive example. I would like them to be well educated and I believe Valter will be a good example of how to solve complex technical issues and steadily achieve final goals. Besides this, you are absolutely right - this is pretty expensive project (~ price of business class vehicle) which became possible to bring it to reality due to what I’m doing every day - commercial / enterprise software development. And despite I could make more money on my everyday work I made a decision to invest part of my time (and money) in future and get deeper into robotics. I hope my sons will appreciatate such a decision when they get grown up.
About simulator - I’m hardly working on this right now. Trying to put valuable parts into Gazebo. I had RTABMap assembled detailed map of the house, but I’m planning to create a detailed plan with photo textures in Blender.