Draft of minutes for the Pisa meeting

I enclose a draft of the minutes of our very interesting and intense
meeting in Pisa last sunday. Could those of you that participated take
a look at it, and send me corrections and additions (so that I can put
it on the website at the end of the week). For example, I
don't have something on the Communciations section. (Except for what
Peter told me, but I don't believe him :-)

Herman
===============

Minutes of the OROCOS project meeting, Pisa 3 Februari 2002

Attendees
=========
Herman Bruyninckx, Peter Soetens, Raja Chatilla, Sarah Fleury, Anthony
Mallet, Henrik Christensen, Anders Oreback, Christian Schlegel, Cezary
Zielinski, Vincent Duindam, Gerald Umgeher, Helmut Nochmayer, Marcus
Kleinehagenbrock, Jannik Fritsch, Silvia Zecchini, Nicola Diolaiti,
Gerhard Kraetzschmar, Tomasso Cabrelli, Nicola Smaldone, Francisco Ortiz,
Wisama Khalil, Gurvinder S. Virk, Bill Wansen, Paolo Meriggi, Pere Ridao,
GianAntonio Magnani, Luca Bascetta.

8:30 -- 13:30 Presentations
===========================
   H. Bruyninckx     Project overview
   C. Schlegel       Communication patterns 
   A. Oreback        (details and design decisions)
   G. Kraetzschmar   MIRO (Middleware for robots)
   A. Mallet         Execution engine draft based on Genom
                     experience
   G. Virk           CLAWAR software needs/results 
   C. Zielinski      MRROC++ 
                     (Multi-Robot Research-Oriented Controller)
   P. Soetens        Real-time Motion Control

The presentations by Herman Bruyninckx, Christian Schlegel, Anthony
Mallet, Cezary Zielinski and Peter Soetens were on the documents that had
been posted before on the Orocos web site. These documents got feedback
that will result in updates and more integrated versions. The overall
feeling is that we have come a long way in meeting each other in design
drafts that we feel happy about. More specifically, the areas of control
(specification, execution and monitoring) and inter-component
communication have matured. There remains issues to be clarified (where
and when to use CORBA, for example), but the motivation is there to work
on these issues.

The Orocos project got high visibility in the EURON meeting during the
two previous days. As a result, two originally unscheduled presentations
were included. Gerhard Kraetzschmar talked about the experiences with
their mobile robot systems; Gurvinder Virk presented the links with the
CLAWAR network, and stressed the importance of defining and using
standards, for software as well as hardware components. With respect to
CLAWAR, we agreed to keep each other informed about relevant evolutions
and meetings.

15:00 - 17:00 Technical discussions in two working groups
=========================================================
1. Execution control
--------------------
This group discussed the suggestions from LAAS about what infrastructure
Orocos should offer to support the off-line specification and on-line
execution of a task. This support consists of: decoupling of execution
control and command processing; decoupling of control flow and data flow;
compiler preprocessor to translate templated specifiction into library;
state machine support for sequencing.

2. Communication
-----------------
???

Future
======
- EURON funding will allow us to organize an extra project workshop. This
  will probably be organized in April, in Toulouse.
- Another meeting will be scheduled at the end of July, in Stockholm.
- Short term work: 
  * specification of component interfaces for common robotics devices;
  * integration of the control components of Toulouse and Leuven; 
  * more detailed description of which communication patterns and code to use
    in what situations;
  * release of device driver repository.