Re: Announcement: GDHE 3.2

On Thu, 26 Jun 2003, Matthieu Herrb wrote:

> GDHE 3.2 released
[...]
> I'm pleased to announce that GDHE version 3.2  is now available.  

Great!

Some questions about future developments, mostly stimulated by the
discussions of last week's Orocos GUI meeting...

- how difficult would it be to extend GDHE to interactively
  _construct_ robot models, including definition of kinematics
  objects, such as Tool Centre Point etc.?
- how difficult would it be to add an external "plug in" for, for
  example, calculation of a robot's kinematics or motion planning?
- can GDHE work with "events" to and from external applications, such
  as a robot controller that wants to visualise some things through
  GDHE?
- is the integration of "plotting" functionality on your roadmap?
  (I.e., visualizing the positions or velocities of a robot.)
- is TCL intervening in all drawing operations? I mean, once one has
  set up the kinematic structure of a robot, is the motion of that
  robot then only programmable through interpreted TCL scripts, or can
  it be attached to a compiled program?
  Have you ever noticed a performance problem with the fact that the
  driving commands of the simulation come from a scripting language and
  not a compiled language?
- does GDHE allow bidirectional interaction? That is, indicating
  a position on the simulation which is then send to a connected
  external application.
- do you somewhere have a roadmap and corresponding TODO list for the
  project?


I tried to build the package (Debian Linux, unstable 2.4.20), but got
this failure in the ./configure step:
  [...]
  checking for X... libraries /usr/X11R6/lib, headers /usr/X11R6/include
  checking for gethostbyname... (cached) yes
  checking for connect... yes
  checking for remove... yes
  checking for shmat... yes
  checking for IceConnectionNumber in -lICE... yes
  checking if libXmu needs libXt... no
  ./configure: line 4544: /tclConfig.sh: Unknown file or directory

Any idea about what went wrong? I have the following Debian Tcl packages
installed:
ii  itcl3.1        3.1.0-7        [incr Tcl] OOP extension for Tcl - run-time
ii  tcl8.3         8.3.5-3        Tcl (the Tool Command Language) v8.3 - run-t
ii  tcl8.4         8.4.3-2        Tcl (the Tool Command Language) v8.4 - run-t
ii  tcl8.4-dev     8.4.3-2        Tcl (the Tool Command Language) v8.4 - devel

Herman

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