First release of MARIE - Mobile and Autonomous Robotics Integration Environment

Hello, 

We are proud to announce the first public release of MARIE, Version 0.1 
(Tinker). It is available at http://marie.sourceforge.net/ 

The Mobile and Autonomous Robotics Integration Environment (MARIE) is a 
robotic development and integration environment focused on existing 
softwares reusability and exploitation of already available APIs and 
middlewares frequently used in robotics. 

The main purpose of MARIE is to create a rapid-prototyping approach to 
software development in robotics. 

- What is MARIE? 

MARIE is a new design tool for mobile and autonomous robot application, 
designed to facilitate the integration of multiple heterogeneous 
software elements. It is a flexible tool based on a distributed model, 
thus allowing the realization of an application using one machine or 
various networked machines, architectures and platforms. 

- How do we do this? 

By creating several modules which have a specific role in the overall 
application. The first part consists of application adapters which 
handle all the details of a specific external application, including the 
starting and stopping of the application and the data conversion. The 
application adapters communicate together using a common data 
language based on XML (see Data types documentation). These communications 
are handled by the communication adapters which can handle several 
communication paradigms. All these modules are supervised by the 
application manager which delegates the communication part to one 
or several communication managers. 

MARIE Version 0.1 contains Application Adapters for Player/Stage/Gazebo 
(http://playerstage.sf.net, from USC), CARMEN 
(http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~carmen/, from CMU) and RobotFlow/FlowDesigner 
(http://flowdesigner.sf.net, from UdeS). 
Also, it supports splitter and mailbox communication adapters. 


The MARIE Team 
Yannick Brosseau 
Carle Côté 
Dominic Létourneau 
Francois Michaud 
http://marie.sourceforge.net/ 
http://www.gel.usherbrooke.ca/laborius/