Re: Re: Open source robot controllers

On Mon, 24 Sep 2001, Jean-Marc Valin wrote:

[..]
> Also, I'm not sure I understand what you meant about Overflow being or
> not like Simulink,

I mean that Simulink does force the user to use any type of
`framework' (in the software engineering meaning of the word, i.e., a
ready set of code, that one can parameterize and in which one can hook
some functionality). orocos is building frameworks for robotics; you
are building a framework for speech processing; etc. Overflow could
offer some of these frameworks for the users to fill in.


[..]
> The idea between an Overflow node is that you "ask" for its output and
> in order to do the computation, it (recursivly) asks its input nodes for
> their return value. In that way, the final result is thus computed
> recursivly by asking the last node for its output.

Does this mean you cannot cope with feedback loops?

> Now, about the idea that orocos would provide a framework and not allow
> any other way to connect nodes, I think that would be simply implemented
> as a layer above Overflow that would add restrictions on the
> connections.

That might be one possibility; another one could be that one framework
corresponds to one Node of Overflow?

> Last, the main Overflow documentation page is at:
> http://freespeech.sourceforge.net/FreeSpeech/html/Overflow/doc.html
Waw, that's a lot of documentation already :-)

Herman