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Dear Prof. Hermann Bruyninckx and the OROCON community,
I would like to join the OROCON consortium offering our really OPENED,
HARDWARE-Independent and MULTI-MACHINE platform for robotics control,
named GENERIS.
I would like to convince you to use GENERIS as the core platform of
OROCON because I believe that it represents a valuable tool to reach the
OROCON goals without spending effort on basic development, and therefore
to give the proposal a more advanced scope.
My aim is to promote the GENERIS software in order to enable robotics
people to concentrate on real research and to avoid re-inventing the
wheel each time a new robot has to be developed. GENERIS has been
developed with the same spirit as OROCON at a research robotics
laboratory of the Joint Research Centre of Ispra (belonging to the
European Commission).
In order to introduce GENERIS, here follows a brief description of the
project. For more information, I will forward on the 8th of January the
Product Presentation (as soon as I come back to office) or contact me by
e_mail([email protected]).
In early 1992, we started the GENERIS project development because we
needed very opened, flexible and hardware independent software for
robotics control in order to achieve our laboratory experiments. We
focussed a lot on the architecture and we obtained a very reliable and
efficient system. The people involved in the team were robotics and
software specialists with a very strong expertise in laser welding
machine controllers and hard real-time software development for process
control. In 1995, the project led to a primitive version of GENERIS for
Cartesian robots. In 1996, we get funds from the DG13 for extending the
architecture to industrial robots to be really independent from the
robot geometry, electro-mechanics and hardware computer. In 1998, we
obtained the first version of GENERIS that we licensed to ERXA, the
company involved in the GENERIS software development since the
beginning. Today GENERIS version 3.0 is in preparation and to be
released in early March 2001 with 3 products orientation: a hardware
integrated version for simple machine control, a development environment
for porting on new robots and for integrating new functions, a
demo/educational version running stand-alone on a PC and simulating a
connection to a real robot.
GENERIS is a registered trademark and protected by copyright. GENERIS is
a maintained software product and is continuously upgraded by the JRC. I
know that the OROCON project is in search of free-software, this is a
matter we shall negotiate in case of interest from your part. Just
notice that the aim underlying in the GENERIS philosophy is to be a
common development platform to reduce time-to market and to bring
research results to the market.
GENERIS has been written in ANSI-C instead of C++ for efficiency
reasons. GENERIS is a maintainable product and for that purpose we based
the software development process on the ESA PSS-05 standard, and the
system is fully documented. Project documents are in Italian but User
guides are being translated in English (available with version 3.0).
Its design is Object-Oriented, displaying a set of independent modules
arranged in different hierarchical levels: user-interface, programs
interpretation, trajectory interpolation, Axes servo-control, I/O
Interface, Real-time data-base, remote interfaces, etc.
All the modules use a set of primitives, called 'kernel', for efficient
inter-task communication, tasks creation, debugging, use of real-time
clocks, configuration files reading, access to the real-time data-base
and access the I/O interface.
The VxWorks Operating System form Wind River Systems, has been used for
the NC part of the system but the GENERIS kernel architecture permits to
be ported on others. Personally, I don't trust on free RTOS as RT-LINUX
because they are not supported and in an industrial environment the
product reliability and maintenance are very important aspects.
However, I understand that in the scientific community, RT-linux is
desirable. Then, if you accept GENERIS, one of the project's tasks could
be to port GENERIS on rt-linux.
The user interface runs on Windows platforms and communicates with the
NC side through UDP/IP. A DLL library is available for connecting to the
NC side and to develop user interfaces with the most appropriate
MS-Windows tool. For instance, an Open-GL kinematics simulator that
connects to GENERIS NC side has been developed by the Polytechnics
University of Valencia, and a multi-robot remote control interface
(GEN-IDE) has been built with visual Basic. For the UNIX world, we
have implemented the same communication library for the ENVISION TR
graphic simulator (from Deneb).
Other standards like CORBA may be implemented as an interface to the NC
side of the system. We are quite available to update or reshape the
system for integrating new functions and standard interfaces.
The GENERIS architecture is opened at the different levels of the motion
generation process and at the hardware level (see product presentation),
in order to be portable on any manipulator and computer platform (+ I/O
boards + Intelligent Motion control boards + field bus) but also in
order to ease the development of new functions and processes (as tasks).
GENERIS is completely configurable (several servo-control loops rates
may be used - limits are given by the hardware only) at functional level
and system resource level (ram used by processes, priority levels of
processes, etc).
At the functional level, GENERIS has a library of Inverse kinematics
routines developed with the Porting tool-kit. A set of trajectory
generation functions is available: linear, circular and splines with
fly-by connections, given Cartesian velocity/acceleration profiles
modifiable at run-time and advanced orientation control (constant,
sliding, spline).
The GENERIS robot programming language, named ARM, is based on C
language and offers a variety of motion control and mathematical
functions. The programs are pre-compiled in an internal format and then
downloaded to the NC interpreter. The current version permits two
programs to run at the same time.
At the moment, GENERIS is not opened for integrating a new language as
XML and for implementing new trajectory types. These features could be
implemented in the frame of the OROCON project.
Another important feature of GENERIS to control complete work cells
stands in its multi-machine architecture consisting of several robots
and auxiliary devices like conveyors and rotating tables. The CPU
resources limit the number of robots.
Finally, GENERIS software represents 20 Man-years of software
development; several applications have been carried out for Cartesian
industrial manipulators used in production lines and for tele-operated
anthropomorphous arms used in nuclear environments. Currently, we are
porting the software on industrial manipulators for plastic finishing
applications.
As you can see, this software has a very high potential to any type of
robotics applications.
So, please, let me know if you are interested to include GENERIS in your
proposal.
If yes, we could use the software for mobile robotics (why not soccer
robots), walking robots, cooperating arms, etc. Special algorithms for
force control, vision, calibration etc. could be integrated and tested.
In this scenario, the JRC could provide the technical support, train
people, collaborate in the improvement of the software architecture and
interfaces, etc.
In this way, OROCON would consist of an integrated set of sub-products
like GENERIS and a range of modules and applications ready for
commercial distribution by the related partners.
Sorry if I importunate you with my insistence, but I find this occasion
very important to reach your and my hope of an open world for robotics.
Thank you very much for your attention.
Best regards
Emilio RUIZ MORALES
Joint Research Centre Ispra
Institute for Systems, Informatics and Safety
T.P. 210
Via Fermi, 1
I-21020 Ispra (VA) - ITALY
Tel: +39.0332.78.93.10
Fax: +39.0332.78.95.76
E_mail: [email protected]