12:12 p.m.
Hi all,
It's been a while since we've coordinated last. I think it's about time
we get together for a status update, and identify what we should be
working towards for F-14 onwards.
So far we have the eventual goal of getting a robotics LiveCD together,
and we've briefly discussed creating some demo programs for robotics
education. We should continue brainstorming and narrowing down areas of
development for these ideas. We've also got quite a list of interesting
projects on the SIG wiki page, is anyone actively working on packaging
any of them?
Rich Mattes
8:36 p.m.
On 26.06.2010 13:12, Rich Mattes wrote:
Hi all,
Hi Rich and all.
I have been pretty busy recently but finally made it to reply. Thanks
for the great work on the Player package btw!
It's been a while since we've coordinated last. I think
it's about time
we get together for a status update, and identify what we should be
working towards for F-14 onwards.
So far we have the eventual goal of getting a robotics LiveCD together,
and we've briefly discussed creating some demo programs for robotics
education. We should continue brainstorming and narrowing down areas of
development for these ideas. We've also got quite a list of interesting
projects on the SIG wiki page, is anyone actively working on packaging
any of them?
You're absolutely right! I'm personally working on packaging Fawkes atm.
We have just pushed the 0.4 release which supports system-wide
installation. The current package still has some issues that I have to
go through, but eventually I'll file it for review. It's on
http://fedorapeople.org/~timn/robotics/.
Since Fawkes provides the whole stack, from the low-level system all the
way up to a scripting environment for the robot behavior, I think it is
a good candidate to form the base system. With Player and Stage in
Fedora, that should be our simulation environment for a start. Later we
can try more fancy 3D sims, but for the beginning that should suffice.
In IRC meetings a few months ago we had this idea of a game-like intro
to the system, where you need to get the robot do something in the
simulated environment which we make more complex from level to level.
E.g. in the start it could be clicking for "go there" if someone comes
up with a GUI, or text commands otherwise. The hardest level would
require you to write a program that gets a more elaborated task done.
E.g. find a box in the environment. Check for the color of the box,
depending on the color, bring it to destination area A, B or C. That's
not what it has to be, but it's just to give you an idea of where I
would like things going. I want to get people interested in playing with
the robot. And once they're addicted we suck out their brain by making
them write awesome robot software :-)
What 'ya think? What are your ideas? What do you (that's you sitting in
front of the monitor, yes, you!) want to see on a robot LiveCD and what
can you and do you want to do to help?
Tim
--
Tim Niemueller <tim(a)niemueller.de> www.niemueller.de
=================================================================
Imagination is more important than knowledge. (Albert Einstein)
9:25 p.m.
Hi Tim, hi all,
As I mention in some mail..I have here at my Univ (Universidad Autral
de Chile - Puerto Montt) a automation/robotic framework called
monoBOTICS (http://www.monobotics.ic.uach.cl), it is on a alpha stage
but in conjunction with our brother project Icarus (our 3D sim part),
we can do allready pretty cool stuff.
All our stuff is write it in C# (beside some C libs needed in some
parts) so currently runs on Windows, linux and Mac (monoBOTICS is
mainly focused on linux)...
We have X10 support that is easy as drag a x10 object to the scene and
control your appliance using the object properties..Plus Icarus
features you can add .3ds models to the scene or start a new one from
scratch with 3D primitives..same behaviour for phidgets devices, other
sensors (including URG laser range finders), motor controllers, some
zegbee NCD devices and even dynamixel bioloid servo motors and sensors.
Other cool stuff that we have is our C# wrapper for ffmpeg, currently
we can add a videoplayer into a 3D scene (imaging your webcam or any
ffmpeg supported media image as a cube/sphere texture) and we allmost
have the avility to take the audio from the media using ffmpeg but
play it with openal for 3d positioning (currently working just solving
some "special" cases).. :-)
Plus we have some basic ANN support using NeuronDotNet behind the
scene but as easy as drag objectd into the scene to add inteligence to
a envirinment scene (we have here at the univ a smart instrumented
office that learn the user behaviour about lights, heather, etc and
then act automatically to set the proper environment conditions..)
Saddly you are not going to find all this info on our websites since
we are a reduce number of developers but is alk there on the source
repos :-) .. And tes we need to add more samples, help and promotional
images and videos to show alk thus stuff...
I telk you all this becouse we do most of our work with Fedora, so may
be is a early stage to add an alpha project like mine to fedora, but
would be nice to have it in the near future or if there is some real
interest we can think into add some "preview" reduced package with a
small set of more mature features..think in our project in something
like MS Robothc Studio...ohh btw, we also have phisics basic support
using ODE (with a wrapper for that one to of course :-)
Let me know what you think guys...
Cheers,
Mauricio Henriquez
Escuela de Computacion
Universidad Austral de Chile
Puerto Montt
El 24-08-2010, a las 21:36, Tim Niemueller <tim(a)niemueller.de>
escribió:
On 26.06.2010 13:12, Rich Mattes wrote:
> Hi all,
Hi Rich and all.
I have been pretty busy recently but finally made it to reply. Thanks
for the great work on the Player package btw!
> It's been a while since we've coordinated last. I think it's about
> time
> we get together for a status update, and identify what we should be
> working towards for F-14 onwards.
>
> So far we have the eventual goal of getting a robotics LiveCD
> together,
> and we've briefly discussed creating some demo programs for robotics
> education. We should continue brainstorming and narrowing down
> areas of
> development for these ideas. We've also got quite a list of
> interesting
> projects on the SIG wiki page, is anyone actively working on
> packaging
> any of them?
You're absolutely right! I'm personally working on packaging Fawkes
atm.
We have just pushed the 0.4 release which supports system-wide
installation. The current package still has some issues that I have to
go through, but eventually I'll file it for review. It's on
http://fedorapeople.org/~timn/robotics/.
Since Fawkes provides the whole stack, from the low-level system all
the
way up to a scripting environment for the robot behavior, I think it
is
a good candidate to form the base system. With Player and Stage in
Fedora, that should be our simulation environment for a start. Later
we
can try more fancy 3D sims, but for the beginning that should suffice.
In IRC meetings a few months ago we had this idea of a game-like intro
to the system, where you need to get the robot do something in the
simulated environment which we make more complex from level to level.
E.g. in the start it could be clicking for "go there" if someone comes
up with a GUI, or text commands otherwise. The hardest level would
require you to write a program that gets a more elaborated task done.
E.g. find a box in the environment. Check for the color of the box,
depending on the color, bring it to destination area A, B or C. That's
not what it has to be, but it's just to give you an idea of where I
would like things going. I want to get people interested in playing
with
the robot. And once they're addicted we suck out their brain by making
them write awesome robot software :-)
What 'ya think? What are your ideas? What do you (that's you sitting
in
front of the monitor, yes, you!) want to see on a robot LiveCD and
what
can you and do you want to do to help?
Tim
--
Tim Niemueller <tim(a)niemueller.de> www.niemueller.de
=================================================================
Imagination is more important than knowledge. (Albert Einstein)
_______________________________________________
robotics mailing list
robotics(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/robotics
10:26 p.m.
Hi Mauricio and all.
I had a brief look. Seems you have done some nice work on the project.
At the moment though I think it is not a viable solution for the LiveCD
for the following reasons.
The software is written in C# which is a problem, especially if you want
to put it on a LiveCD, because the environment is a pretty big beast and
it adds quite some packages. There is a reason why it has been removed
from the Desktop LiveCD.
We have software available which has been developed, used and tested for
years. In particular Player/Stage are mature and widely used and have
been incorporated or connected to many projects. Fawkes has been around
for four years and has been used and hardened at various RoboCup events
and demos in real life scenarios, and it has been released. And all of
these are available today. An Alpha level software is not a good start
for a teaser project that should attract people.
I don't see any kind of scripting interface. Something like this is
necessary to write programs on-the-fly and go with the game idea,
ideally with some behavior description facilities. We don't want to bore
the user watching the compiler. In general writing behavior in
non-scripting languages is tedious, to say the least.
I don't want to discourage you. I think you should go forward, release
it and package it, even if it is not used for the LiveCD. It might also
be worthwhile to think about providing an interface to the "outside"
world to connect with other frameworks out there. Maybe the 3D
environment could be connected to Fawkes as a simulation environment or
display?
Regards from Pittsburgh,
Tim
--
Tim Niemueller <tim(a)niemueller.de> www.niemueller.de
=================================================================
Imagination is more important than knowledge. (Albert Einstein)
11:37 p.m.
On 8/24/2010 9:36 PM, Tim Niemueller wrote:
On 26.06.2010 13:12, Rich Mattes wrote:
> Hi all,
Hi Rich and all.
I have been pretty busy recently but finally made it to reply. Thanks
for the great work on the Player package btw!
> It's been a while since we've coordinated last. I think it's about time
> we get together for a status update, and identify what we should be
> working towards for F-14 onwards.
>
> So far we have the eventual goal of getting a robotics LiveCD together,
> and we've briefly discussed creating some demo programs for robotics
> education. We should continue brainstorming and narrowing down areas of
> development for these ideas. We've also got quite a list of interesting
> projects on the SIG wiki page, is anyone actively working on packaging
> any of them?
You're absolutely right! I'm personally working on packaging Fawkes atm.
We have just pushed the 0.4 release which supports system-wide
installation. The current package still has some issues that I have to
go through, but eventually I'll file it for review. It's on
http://fedorapeople.org/~timn/robotics/.
Since Fawkes provides the whole stack, from the low-level system all the
way up to a scripting environment for the robot behavior, I think it is
a good candidate to form the base system. With Player and Stage in
Fedora, that should be our simulation environment for a start. Later we
can try more fancy 3D sims, but for the beginning that should suffice.
In IRC meetings a few months ago we had this idea of a game-like intro
to the system, where you need to get the robot do something in the
simulated environment which we make more complex from level to level.
E.g. in the start it could be clicking for "go there" if someone comes
up with a GUI, or text commands otherwise. The hardest level would
require you to write a program that gets a more elaborated task done.
E.g. find a box in the environment. Check for the color of the box,
depending on the color, bring it to destination area A, B or C. That's
not what it has to be, but it's just to give you an idea of where I
would like things going. I want to get people interested in playing with
the robot. And once they're addicted we suck out their brain by making
them write awesome robot software :-)
What 'ya think? What are your ideas? What do you (that's you sitting in
front of the monitor, yes, you!) want to see on a robot LiveCD and what
can you and do you want to do to help?
Tim
Hi all,
Very cool to see that Fawkes is almost ready for release, I remember you
mentioning it a while back. I can try to play with it this weekend, and
I'll be happy to look over the package for review once you submit it.
No worries about the Player package maintenance, I'm happy to do it. In
case you missed the announcement, I was brought on to the Player project
as a maintainer, so I'm now serving as an upstream developer and helping
with the maintenance of the Fedora packages. One of the things we've
been talking about upstream is that Player would be a really good basis
for robotics in education. With a bit of effort in documentation,
curriculum, and tutorials we could easily have a very solid platform for
teaching algorithm design and real-time coding strategies.
Gazebo is still giving me a hard time, there's several dependencies that
are not yet in Fedora, and one that kind of is but is part of a much
larger package. I also need to submit an RFE to see if the bullet
maintainers will enable double precision. I haven't forgotten about it
though. I'm also very interested in packaging the Arduino IDE since I
use it all the time, but it's doing to take some hounding to get
upstream to do proper source tarball releases. And then I'll have to
figure out the java packaging guidelines. Upstream has a ticket open on
the tarball matter, so it may be in the works yet.
The discussions we had in IRC the last time we met about creating some
sort of 'game' environment for Player and Stage fit right into the
educational goals discussed above. Tutorials and examples like Tim is
suggesting would serve as a great jumping-off point for people to get
started with robot programming. The availability of Python bindings to
Player is also a boon to the effort; Python is a very easy language to
pick up, is script-able, and can even be used interactively in the shell
to control a bot (if you can type fast enough!) I'm happy to spend some
time getting a plan together and running it by the rest of the Player
devs, but I think that the goals of the SIG and upstream align quite a bit.
As far as the live cd, I think we should obviously plan on including as
many of the robotics packages as we can (mrpt, rcss*, opencv,p/s/g,
gearbox, fawkes, urg, etc) on top of the base desktop image. We can
strip out things like office, games and productivity, but adding the
-devel packages and devtools is going to take up quite a bit of space.
I'd also like to make sure that all of our packages are aligned with the
latest upstream releases, and put a lot of effort into upstreaming any
of the changes or enhancements we make. Finally, we should definitely
submit it as a Fedora feature once we get our act together; F15/F16
timeframe is probably realistic.
Regards,
Rich
4:28 a.m.
Hi all,
/*Rich Mattes <richmattes(a)gmail.com>*/ wrote on 08/25/2010 9:07:23 AM +0450:
On 8/24/2010 9:36 PM, Tim Niemueller wrote:
[...]
The discussions we had in IRC the last time we met about creating some
sort of 'game' environment for Player and Stage fit right into the
educational goals discussed above. Tutorials and examples like Tim is
suggesting would serve as a great jumping-off point for people to get
started with robot programming. The availability of Python bindings to
Player is also a boon to the effort; Python is a very easy language to
pick up, is script-able, and can even be used interactively in the shell
to control a bot (if you can type fast enough!) I'm happy to spend some
time getting a plan together and running it by the rest of the Player
devs, but I think that the goals of the SIG and upstream align quite a bit.
Nice to
see some non-spam activity again ;)
I fully agree with having the demo program(s) inside the existing
upstream projects (or creating an upstream project), since I think it is
a better place to maintain such demos. As Tim said, the demo has many
areas to advance so it'll (hopefully) become a real project rather than
some few lines of code as a trivial package maintained by a package
maintainer.
I'll think about the questions Tim asked in the last part of his email
and answer later :P
Good luck,
Hedayat
As far as the live cd, I think we should obviously plan on including
as
many of the robotics packages as we can (mrpt, rcss*, opencv,p/s/g,
gearbox, fawkes, urg, etc) on top of the base desktop image. We can
strip out things like office, games and productivity, but adding the
-devel packages and devtools is going to take up quite a bit of space.
I'd also like to make sure that all of our packages are aligned with the
latest upstream releases, and put a lot of effort into upstreaming any
of the changes or enhancements we make. Finally, we should definitely
submit it as a Fedora feature once we get our act together; F15/F16
timeframe is probably realistic.
Regards,
Rich
10:33 a.m.
On 08/24/2010 11:26 PM, Tim Niemueller wrote:
Hi Mauricio and all.
I had a brief look. Seems you have done some nice work on the project.
Thanks, we think that to :-)
At the moment though I think it is not a viable solution for the
LiveCD
for the following reasons.
Oh yeap right, I forget that the hole idea of the post was the LiveCD
sorry and yes I absolutly agree than is not at a stage to be included on
a livecd...
The software is written in C# which is a problem, especially if you
want
to put it on a LiveCD, because the environment is a pretty big beast and
it adds quite some packages. There is a reason why it has been removed
from the Desktop LiveCD.
also agree, not good for livecd, may be later for a desktop DVD edition..
We have software available which has been developed, used and tested
for
years. In particular Player/Stage are mature and widely used and have
been incorporated or connected to many projects. Fawkes has been around
for four years and has been used and hardened at various RoboCup events
and demos in real life scenarios, and it has been released. And all of
these are available today. An Alpha level software is not a good start
for a teaser project that should attract people.
It was not my intention to compete with any of those software, which by
the way I think that they do a pretty good job. Sure they are around for
a couple of years, but they also have a "year 1" at some point right?.
Mine it begin to be used in a local context with good opinions, who
knows may be in robocop some day to .. :-)
A couple of differences, IMHO Player/Stage is more focused in
*professional* robot HW (Pionner vehicles, steroscopic camras, etc..),
our software try to support more cheap and common HW that are frequently
use it at least here in LatAm...And second diference, we support the use
of high level programming languages (C#, VB .NET and even Java) instead
of C/C++, we want to *middle skill* programmer can access to
robotic/automation devices without been hard C/C++ programmers...and of
course also non-programmer users..Here in latam the more big amount of
programmers use some .NET or Java language and not to much C/C++, so it
have sense for us to deliver a robotic/automation solution for thse kind
of developers..
I don't see any kind of scripting interface. Something like this
is
necessary to write programs on-the-fly and go with the game idea,
ideally with some behavior description facilities. We don't want to bore
the user watching the compiler. In general writing behavior in
non-scripting languages is tedious, to say the least.
We do have scripting in icarus, each object that you add to the scene
have the ability to have its own script and also more project level
ones..Currently we support C# scripting that runs on runtime. Aside of
that, we have a code generator and compilation tool, so we can generate
a C# or VB .NET version of all that you put on the scene, in that way a
programmer can do the general solution approach with Icarus/monoBOTICS
and then generate all that in C# automatically and take his code to a
stand alone app if it want..or even compile the complete scene to a .dll
if is needed. Plus we have a visual programming language to add logic
graphically to the scene..
Bu ok, agree may be not a good idea to add a alpha stage software for
users, but the idea was to see if there is any interest to begin to
think about some rpm packages of our software in the near future..
I don't want to discourage you. I think you should go forward,
release
it and package it, even if it is not used for the LiveCD. It might also
be worthwhile to think about providing an interface to the "outside"
world to connect with other frameworks out there. Maybe the 3D
environment could be connected to Fawkes as a simulation environment or
display?
Sounds like a good idea...do you have some API documentation to see if
is possible?
Regards from Pittsburgh,
Regards from Puerto Montt ;-)
Mauricio
Tim
4997
days inactive
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robotics@lists.fedoraproject.org
6 comments
4 participants
participants (4)
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buhochilenoi＠gmail.com -
Hedayat Vatankhah -
Rich Mattes -
Tim Niemueller