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Animation in reflex

The assessment behind the animation standard, written with it in #35. The animation plan builds it.

Add it, at the block level, with strict rules.

  • Reflex has to own block-level animation; mission SITL cannot. A racing-drone SITL scene shows a mission, with gates, a course, perception, and every block running at once. It cannot isolate one block’s behaviour, so it cannot show why motor lag costs phase margin, or which torque the mixer gives up first. Those explanations belong next to the block, in the repo that defines it and that its consumers read.
  • Animation helps with exactly the things these blocks are hard on. Attitude on SO(3), cross-coupling, saturation, and time delay are difficult to understand from plots alone, and easy to see in a 3-D view synchronized with plots.
  • It reuses evidence that is already planned. The V&V plans already produce traces: scenarios, golden traces, closed-loop runs (BB-C1, BB-D1, BB-I2). An animation is a view of a trace the harness produces anyway, so the marginal cost is the player, not the content.
  • The risk is real and manageable. Animations go stale and can look convincing while being wrong. Both risks are handled by the same rule that already governs figures (BB-C1): everything is generated from the block’s code, carries its provenance, is checked for staleness in CI, and is paired with a quantitative check.

Mission SITL in racing-drone keeps everything that is about the mission. The two are to share a trace schema and a player, so they look consistent and nothing is built twice (boundary). The schema is reflex’s today; sharing the player with racing-drone is P5 of the plan, not yet done.