Hi Rich,
Thanks for the post, it looks great :)
Hedayat
/*Rich Mattes <richmattes(a)gmail.com>*/ wrote on 05/23/2011 11:38:27 PM
+0450:
Hi all,
I'm planning on publishing a blog post to fedora planet that goes into
more detail explaining the f15 robotics suite.� I'm sending what I
have so far, if you have a chance to look it over and add/clarify
anything i missed, I'd appreciate it.� I'd like to get it published
before release day.
Thanks,
Rich
=====
With Fedora 15's release imminent, I'd like to take the time to talk
about the Robotics Suite feature.� As some of you may have noticed,
the Fedora Robotics Suite is new for Fedora 15, and it is already
showing up as a bullet point in many reviews of the Fedora 15 alpha
and beta releases.� It's clear that very few people actually know what
we're trying to accomplish with this feature, so I'll do my best to
explain our motivations.� The Fedora 15 release notes have this to say:
Fedora 15 now includes the Robotics Suite, a collection of
packages that provides a usable out-of-the-box robotics
development and simulation environment. This ever-growing suite
features up-to-date robotics frameworks, simulation environments,
utility libraries, and device support, and consolidates them into
an easy-to-install package group. Visit
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Robotics for more details.
In a nutshell, the Fedora Robotics SIG has been working hard over the
past few releases to create a fast and easy way to dive into robotics
development, for newbies and seasoned developers alike.� The first
visibile of this effort is the Fedora Robotics Suite, a package group
that brings together many different robotics related libraries to make
it as easy as possible for developers to use Fedora in their robotics
projects.
�
Why is the suite needed?
The open-source robotics scene is diverse, consisting of vast amounts
of independent libraries and frameworks that can be used for all kinds
of robotics tasks.� Unfortunately, the robotics develpment community
is small enough that even some of the largest and most well-known
software packages are still "niche" packages in the scope of a large
linux distribution, often with only a handful of developers upstream.
These factors add up to several problems that the Robotics Suite aims
to alleviate:
�
* *Software is difficult to configure and install*.� This is
mostly a problem for users who aren't familiar with Linux
development and are diving in headfirst.� If the configuration
and installation process for a software component is complex, or
the process isn't well documented, new users can be put off by
the hurdle of getting their software environment set up, long
before any development can take place.� Our goal is to
streamline the process by doing the hard work for you.
* *Software has too many dependencies*.� Many robotics-related
programs have criticical dependencies on small or fledgling
libraries that otherwise have no use to the linux community in
general.� For example, the Point Cloud Library (currently under
review) depends on the cminpack, flann, and eigen3 libraries.�
We want to make sure all of these are available with Fedora to
spare the users the time-consuming process of finding, building,
and deploying all of these small dependencies.
* *Software doesn't install properly with Fedora's system
libraries*.� Fedora leads the way in software versions with the
latest and greatest packages from upstream.� Often, developers
of these packages are only testing their packages against the
set of libraries on their own machine, and may be oblivious to
build errors resulting from updated system libraries.� The
Robotics SIG encounters these errors during packaging and
updates, and works with upstream to correct the issues.
What's in the Suite?
As noted at
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Robotics, the Robotics Suite
currently includes several large-scale robotics frameworks and
simulators, including Fawkes, Player, Stage, and the RoboCup Soccer
Simulator.� The Robotics Suite also consists of many specialized
libraries like libphidget and libkni thatinteract with robot sensors
and devices, libraries like mrpt and openni that implement specialized
algorithms for things like motion planning and image processing, and
IDEs like Eclipse and Arduino to make code development easier.
Future Plans
The Robotics Suite is a big milestone for the Robotics SIG, but we've
got plenty of grand plans for future Fedora releases.� We'd like to
create an official Robotics Spin for future releases to make it even
easier to sample and use the Robotics Suite, in the home or the
classroom, without having to install Fedora outright.� We are also
sponsoring a Google Summer of Code student to create educational
robotics software for new users that takes advantage of the packages
available in the Robotics Suite.�
_______________________________________________
robotics mailing list
robotics(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/robotics