Reviving Robotics SIG - robotics (ARCHIVED) - Fedora mailing-lists

2 Oct 2009


      Hi all.
It's been about a year since we last coordinated and met on IRC. Many of
us went off at that time for other work (myself for thesis and exams).
I'd like to revive the Robotics SIG again, and I hope you can also
contribute some time and effort.
I'm quite happy to announce that we have finally released the Fawkes
Robot Software Framework which we use on all of our robots. The website
is at http://www.fawkesrobotics.org. I'm currently working on making it
ready for inclusion in Fedora. This brings several components e.g.
Player does not provide, most importantly a behavior engine, a scripting
environment that allows you to "just make the robot do something" in the
simulation environment, something that can become an important part of a
demo LiveCD.
Other major pieces of software we introduced (or wanted to) as Robotics
SIG are the Player and Stage packages. Player is in there, but is
waiting for a major upgrade. The Stage review stalled and was closed,
the Gazebo review never posted. Fortunately I was contacted recently by
someone wanting to jump on the Player/Stage train.
So I would like to coordinate with everybody interested in the Robotics
SIG on how to go forward from here. Some things to consider:
- Learn about and integrate new people, there have been quite a few new
  subscriptions to the mailing list, so I hope for more work force :-)
- Player/Stage/Gazebo packaging
- Fawkes inclusion and small "robotics game" to develop to get the user
  easily involved in a simulation environment
- RoboCup Soccer Server demo apps (maybe available already?)
- New software packages to include
- Finally prepare for a LiveCD containing all the robot software with an
  easy to use simulation environment, especially as teaser
- Documentation to get people started with robotics (and the LiveCD)
- Toby Collet's distro coordination request
If we have enough interested people we might propose this as a feature
for F-13?
So I think we should discuss a bit and eventually meet on IRC within the
next two weeks or so. I'm pretty open on work days, what about you?
Regards from Aachen,
    Tim
-- 
    Tim Niemueller tim@niemueller.de      www.niemueller.de
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 Imagination is more important than knowledge. (Albert Einstein)