[Fedora Robotics] Robotics SIG update

[buhochilenoi@gmail.com]

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
>
>    

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