Re: Updated document on kin&dyn API...

On Sun, 29 Jun 2003, Pierangelo Masarati wrote:

[...]
> As I've pointed out in a paper we're presenting at the
> Multibody Dynamics 2003 conference in Lisboa, coming next week,
> http://mbdyn.aero.polimi.it/~masarati/Publications/os2003.pdf

Great! I have been looking for such a paper about mbdyn :-)

[...]
> One critical point is that niche projects
> do not attract users.  This is particularly true for multibody
> software, shich is very specialistic: 

I am quite optimistic that this will change in the near future. The
only problem at this moment is that the users of these kind of sofware
lag behind a year or two-three with respect to the users that use and
hack the Linux operating system. Anyway, I am very interested in
contributing to mbdyn. I also do have some quite worked out software
engineering suggestions, such as the Object-Port-Connector pattern
that was worked out in a master thesis this year
 <http://people.mech.kuleuven.ac.be/~bruyninc/thesis-cosaert.pdf>
As soon as mbdyn is decoupled from its initial target application
(aerodynamic simulations) and features a common core on top of which
any sort of dynamics application can be implemented, the user response
will be much larger. Now you only advertise mbdyn mainly as an
aerodynamics package, which ``scares away'' visitors of the website
that are interested in other dynamics domains.

[...]
> I expect robotics software to have a much wider basin of potential
> users; 
Not really that much wider than general dynamics simulation!

> However, both projects de facto address
> niche problems, so ddo not expect much feedback unless you provide
> from the beginning something that works well enough to attract users. 

I know, and that's why I added this ironic remark about "the
Cathedral" :-)

Thanks for your feedback anyway! (Even if it was "off topic" in the
context of my post :-)
But it is not really off topic in the Orocos context: you might have
seen the stream of posts during the last week, discussin the "Orocos
II" proposal; in that proposal, simulation of dynamical systems is one
of the work packages, for robotic systems but also other "bond graph
like" dynamical systems.

Herman

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