Re: New Release of orocos@kth

On Thu, 20 Mar 2003 [email protected] wrote:

> There is now a new release of orocos@kth.
Great!

It's been quit on the mailinglist also from the KU Leuven side, but once
again this was a sign of very intense activity :-)

> Two industrial projects have started to use orocos@kth. Although this means
> that not much new code will be contributed back to orocos@kth, it does mean
> that bugs will be ironed out faster.
And they hopefully will give some useful inputs too :-)

There are some topics I want to discuss with respect to the CORBA
activities in Orocos.

In Leuven, we are also involved in the OCEAN project
 <http://www.fidia.it/english/research_ocean_fr.htm>
where CORBA is the focus point for the developments of the machine
control middleware. We really want to go "the whole way", and start an
implementation of TAO on the RTAI real-time operating system. And we are
in the process of defining machine control components (Kinematics, HMI,
Control, etc.) There is also another project around CORBA for control:
<http://www.hardrealtimecorba.org/> (led by Ricardo Sanz of the
Autonomous Systems Lab in Madrid).

So, it seems a critical mass of more or less related interests is being
built up in Europe. Therefore, I plan to have a broad discussion on
"CORBA in control" (all sorts of control) in our next "Linux in control"
workshop in Leuven
<http://www.realtimelinuxfoundation.org/events/licws-2003/ws.html>
Feel free to come, to present your views on the future of CORBA-related
projects in control, and to take part in the discussion we will have
about the roadmap for these things for the next couple of years.
One of the major results I want to see from this workshop is a draft for
a proposal for a new open source project. It will have a larger scope
than just robotics, but I guess this is an advantage.
People with concrete and relevant suggestions can apply for an Orocos
travel grant.
Industrial partners with a vision are very welcome too!

A second, more Orocos-related topic is: it would be nice to use the
Linux in Control Workshop to discuss about a "generic" user interface
for robots. It has to be configurable, of course, but that's exactly
what CORBA components should be able to offer.

Third, KU Leuven has done a thorough refactoring of the real-time control
layer of Orocos. We now call it the "Kernel". After all of us have
approved the last description of the design, I will announce it on the
mailinglist.

Best regards,

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