Re: GENERIS for OROCON

On Wed, 27 Dec 2000 [email protected] wrote:

> I would like to join the OROCON consortium offering our really OPENED,
> HARDWARE-Independent and MULTI-MACHINE platform for robotics control,
> named GENERIS.
You are welcome :-) !

> 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]).
The 8th of January is a bit late, taking into account that the
deadline for submission of the proposal is January 15th... And we
definitely need time to get all papers signed by all partners...
So please, make more concrete information available sooner, if
possible.

> 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.
The same motivation inspired other (mainly nuclear) research centers to
do similar things, such as (I forgot their name..) the French nuclear research
center near Paris. Some _very_ good things have been done this ways,
but as far as I know, none of them under Open Source licenses?
In fact, all these efforts are paid by community money, so opening up
their results should be the normal next step to take, isn't it? BTW,
what are the official feeling about open source software at JRC?

> 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.
This is the same goal as OROCOS. Maybe the approach is a bit different
:-) But I am open to every useful contribution from your side
(especially because OROCOS is still an empty box right now :-) )

> 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.
You are a bit outdated in this respect :-) RT-LInux (and others) _are_
commercially supported, and _are_ being used in industry! Even Wind
River Systems is moving a lot in the Linux direction...
Anyway, most of the software should be independent of the RTOS, so I
don't think we have conflicting interests in this matter.

> At the functional level, GENERIS has a library of Inverse kinematics
> routines developed with the Porting tool-kit.
                              ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I don't know this toolkit; do you have references to it?

> As you can see, this software has a very high potential to any type of
> robotics applications.
I see indeed! And I am eager to learn more about it.

Best regards,

Herman

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