Status report: second control milestone reached

Hi,

It's been very quiet on this mailinglist, but the list's activity is
inversely proportional to the coding activity :-) We had 7 or 8 summer
interns here the last two months, and some nice things have been
accomplished. Our second control "milestone" has been reached: after
the position control of a single axis, we now have a full 6D
manipulator under position control.

Also the core infrastructure code is growing, and we almost have a
finite state machine support in the real-time "Execution Engine" to
sequence tasks. We use RTAI as the underlying RTOS, but the
dependencies on it are quite small.

Lot's of holes yet to be filled in of course, but we are progressing :-)
The next Orocos meeting will be in Leuven, somewhere in November, such
that we can have some demos and lively discussion about working
designs and code. We hope to have hybrid force control on the
manipulator by then. (It's been working on our single axis setup for
some time already, but that's not a big achievement :-)

Herman

-- 
  K.U.Leuven, Mechanical Engineering, Robotics Research Group
<http://people.mech.kuleuven.ac.be/~bruyninc> Tel: +32 16 322480