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

On Wed, 9 Jul 2003, Sebastian Wrede wrote:

[...]
> I strongly agree with Markus that vision-oriented projects
> sometimes have other requirements and differently
> to Herman's opinion I cannot currently see an 
> obvious solution to realize complex vision systems.

DId I suggest that these solutions are obvious? :-)

> >From past experiences with realizing complex vision systems,
> I think that the limited usability and high complexity of
> CORBA is a problem for application developers.

Yes, that's why
 (i) Orocos does not depend on CORBA, but is CORBA-ready for those who
     want to use it;
(ii) if you _really_ need networked complex systems, you are either
     doomed to re-invent CORBA (poorly) or to use it (or other forms of
     middleware such as offered in Java or .NET).

Also note that CORBA has provisions (but not yet implementations, if I
am not mistaken) to use "streaming-like" data flows; CORBA is 
just used to set up the stream, which can then stream efficiently
without CORBA intervention.

> We at Bielefeld University are dealing with integrating several vision 
> components, e.g. in the IST-project VAMPIRE. 
> As we also have a mobile robot, we ended up testing OROCOS@KTH 
> which was indeed non-trivial to get running on our linux machines. 

All these things are still beta, you know. It's only by feedback and
help from courageous groups like yours that these things will mature :-)

> But finally we got it to work and we are now in the process of
> evaluating how well it fits our needs. Although OROCOS@KTH is work
> in progress, we have the impression that it might be very well
> suited as middleware solution.
Good! So work with them to make it better...

> For us at Bielefeld as 'vision and robotics' application developers,
> we would be very interested in a reliable and simple to use framework that 
> could be used to integrate systems in both domains.

Do you have any concrete suggestions about what would be your
requirements?

Thanks for responding! And good luck with your applications. I have
the impression that there _is_ a potential critical mass for the
middleware needs you have...

Herman

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