Re: First draft of "OROCOS II" proposal...

Herman Bruyninckx wrote:

> >
> > >From what I know of OROCOS I, (1) is not easy to reach, while (2) is an
> > option for an IP.
> > To be more concrete, and please do not take it as negative critique but as
> > feedback on how to make things used by others/us (maybe other teams had more
> > patience or skills than us). Presently there are 4 OROCOS versions.
>
> There are several _complementary_ activities, not "versions" :-)
>
> > Since RT
> > is not interesting for us, Genom seems too far out of reach, we looked more
> > closely at SmartSoft and OROCOS@KTH. OROCOS@KTH seemed most fitting. On
> > testing there were several difficulties, the largest (in several senses) is
> > TAO, but also a problem is documentation. To reach option (1) it needs
> > substantially more work, expecting people want to download and work. And, to
> > have sufficient time for option (2) it is required to have some minimal
> > resources allocated.
> > SmartSoft is well developed, has a little better documentation. It seems
> > difficult to influence further developments and adaptations to our needs. It
> > also has the same problem of demanding huge resouces and long set-up times
> > (TAO). I remember Henrik stating at the very first meeting "TAO only over my
> > dead body" or something similar.
> >
> > What we ended up with is to develop our own middleware (based on rtf, at the
> > moment purely for Linux but efficent and easy to use), which is at the
> > moment suited for ActIPret, but does not help to make many steps beyond.
> > Hence, our persistent interest in OROCOS.
>
> I think it's time to give the Ulm and KTH developments some more
> critical mass and start discussing technical details with them. Only
> in this way they will get better (and merge maybe some time :-)
>

Hi everybody,

It is quite natural to have several complementary activities, in particular in
open source projects. Therefore I for example do not have any problems with for
example having the KTH implementation of the communication pattern idea in
parallel to the SmartSoft implementation. The implementations are different, the
long term goal is the same and we even use the same underlying CORBA, namely TAO.
The result is not only to have working software packages employed at several
sites so far, but also lots of expertise at both sides, FAW and KTH. Therefore,
we are now in the lucky situation to already have experienced and skilled people
on component software, middleware etc. Unfortunately, at least at FAW, it is me
and Boris who contribute to SmartSoft in _parallel_ to our regular work. We of
course would like to continue to contribute to OROCOS but would appreciate any
support to make the contributions a major activity. We of course would also
welcome any activity which merges into a critical mass. We are strongly
interested in participating in OROCOS beyond the communication basics. As already
mentioned on the GUI workshop, in the near future, we are for example interested
in patterns etc. for the interaction of visualization and collision checkers and
kinematic models etc.


Christian Schlegel


--

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Christian Schlegel
FAW Ulm (Research Institute for Applied Knowledge Processing)
PO Box 2060
D-89010 Ulm
Germany

Tel. : ++49 (731) 501 8949
Fax  : ++49 (731) 501 999
email: [email protected]
WWW  : http://www.faw.uni-ulm.de/
---------------------------------------------------------------------