[Fedora Robotics] Greetings

[Tim Niemueller]

John McLean schrieb:
> I introduced myself yesterday at the meeting on irc, but I'll take a
> moment to reintroduce myself since only two others were on the channel
> when I introduced myself.  

Hi John. Welcome!

> My name is John McLean, and I'm a fedora intern at Red Hat working for
> Greg DeKoenigsberg.  I'd like to help out with the robotics SIG, but
> don't know where to start.  I'm starting to learn about the software
> that's listed on the wiki page, and from what I understand this SIG is
> mainly just trying to get software packaged and in the fedora repos
> right now.  If there's a project within this SIG that needs working on,
> just let me know and I'll start working on it. 

That is only half the truth. Packaging is a first step that needs to be
done. Besides providing the basic packages to drive and develop for a
robot we want to create an educational environment.

We plan to create a LiveCD, that will feature a simulator and simple
control (and later development) environment, that makes it easy to just
start with robotics. See the robot moving in the (simulated)
environment, influence it, make it do weird things. Later on the road
should be integration of a simple development environment that gets
people started. We have agreed on Player/Stage/Gazebo for a start. It is
widely used and features a 2D and 3D simulator and various sensors and
actuators that are supported.

I personally would like to see this LiveCD to hand it out to interested
people, to students, to starters, to kids.

We are currently lacking man power, so you are more than welcome!
Reviews are currently underway for Player and Stage. The next big thing
is fixing these packages to make them suitable for inclusion and push
possible patches upstream and eventually get Gazebo packaged. This is
where I could think work could be done by you - investigating on and
packaging Gazebo.

Besides the LiveCD we want to provide the tool for robotics researchers
and engineers. Thus we need software that is easily extensible. We have
to know what has to happen that someone can make use of Gazebo when it
is installed system wide. Can new models be added on-the-fly, or is
re-compilation necessary (we used it here about two years back and at
that time patching was necessary, this might have changed). What would
we need to do to improve the situation?

If you want to give it a try I'd say get involved with the
Player/Stage/Gazebo endeavor. See what's there, start packaging Gazebo.
Find out how it works, how models are included, how it is run and used,
what needs to be patched and fixed.

What do you think, sounds interesting?

	Tim

-- 
    Tim Niemueller <tim at niemueller.de>      www.niemueller.de
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 Imagination is more important than knowledge. (Albert Einstein)