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
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 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@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@niemueller.de www.niemueller.de ================================================================= Imagination is more important than knowledge. (Albert Einstein) _______________________________________________ robotics mailing list robotics@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/robotics
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
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
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
Hi all,
/*Rich Mattes richmattes@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
robotics@lists.fedoraproject.org