It's time to showcase another programmable device! This time we have a general purpose actuator that can move things around:
It might not look like much, but this subtle machine opens up a lot of possibilities. It is simply called the MovablePlatform and its purpose is dynamically positioning otherwise stationary machinery. Let's look at the trusty RangeFinder from the last post. It's already quite useful on its own. But on top of the MovablePlatform? You can move and rotate it however you see fit to measure different areas.
You can place any machine on top of the platform - we are ignoring physical plausibility here for convenience - we are within a simulation after all. Combine it with a robot-arm (more on that machine later) for example to create a very agile transporting system.
Using the movable platform in Python code follows the conventions of our object-oriented interface:
platformScan = MovablePlatform.find("platformScanner")
#rotate by 85 degrees around the up axis
platformScan.set_target_rotation(yaw=85)
Happy Coding!