Orocos meeting (further information)

Dear Orocos colleagues,

This message contains information about the kick-off meeting of the
Orocos project.

1. Participants
2. Agenda
3. Hands-on session
4. Accomodation information


1. Participants
===============
I received participation aknowledgements of the following people:

  Cezary Zielinski, Warsaw
  Stefano Stramigioli, T.U. Twente (only sunday)
  Markus Vincze, Wien
  Luca Bascetta, GianAntonio Magnani (Politecnico di Milano)
  Marnix Nuttin, Klaas Gadeyne, Herman Bruyninckx (K.U.Leuven)
  Wisama Khalil (Nantes)
  David Austin (Australia)
  Christian Schlegel (Ulm)
  Matthieu Herrb, Anthony Mallet, Felix Ingrand, Sara Fleury, Raja
    Chatila (LAAS)
  Anders Oreback, Henrik Christensen (KTH)

If you are not yet on this list, please send me an email, so that
I can book an appropriately sized meeting room. (And an appropriately
sized number of sandwiches for the lunches, and an appropriately sized
restaurant for the dinner :-)

It happens that there are exactly 15 people (except for the K.U.Leuven
attendees). Which makes the allocation of travel grants rather easy,
because the budget provides for 15 grants of 500 Euros. Please, be
prepared to have original cost statements (hotel, travel) that we can
send to the EU.
Caveats:
 - We will not be able to refund immediately in cash.
 - We still don't have any final contract signed and final budgets
   approved, so there _might_ be last minutes changes in the grants...
 - We haven't received any real money yet, and I don't know exactly
   when the EU will send it.
   (I do not expect these problems to occur though.)
 - When more people will want to attend, the grants will be allocated
   by the EU project partners (LAAS, KTH, KULeuven), in a fair way
   that has to be decided yet.
 - David, I have to check whether we are allowed to spend the grant
   to non EU participants...
 - I need to spent part of the provided total grant money on
   the sandwhich lunches, so that we won't have 500 Euros for each
   participant's grant.


2. Agenda
=========
I also got some (very partial) information about arrival times. From
this, I suggest the following agenda:

Saturday, September 1st

 9:30-11:30: Administrative Kick-off of the EU project
   Only K.U.Leuven, LAAS and KTH should attend this. The goal is to
   make final agreements on who is going to do what in order to
   reach the goals of the EU-sponsored part of the project.

 12:00-13:00: sandwich and getting-acquainted lunch for all participants

 13:00-14:00: 10 minutes introduction of participants:
   - what do you expect from Orocos
   - what do you think you can contribute
   There will be computer and overhead projection available, for
   those who would like to use these facilities.

 14:00-...: design discussion meetings
   The goal of these meetings is to critically discuss the design and
   component specification issues. I realize it is difficult to time
   these creative brainstorming sessions precisely, so the following
   schedule cannot be but tentative.

  14-17: overall vision and design, i.e. basically the contents of
   <http://www.orocos.org/vision.html>

  17:00-18:00: wrapping up the first day's conclusions, and
   constructing the `final' agenda for Sunday

  18:00: short tour of our facilities and current open source projects
   in the Orocos field.

  19:30: dinner in the historic centre of Leuven.
   (The project doesn't have the budget to pay for this dinner ;-(
    However, Leuven has a _very_ good price/quality with respect to
    eating out :-)

Sunday, September 2nd

  9:30-...: Technical detailed design discussions, on the following subtopics:
    * Motion, force and interaction control
    * Kinematics and dynamics
    * Sensor and actuator device drivers
    * Sensor processing
    * Trajectory generation and interpolation
    * Component communication
    * Task planning
    * On-line task coordination
    * Graphical and non-graphical User Interfaces
    * Map building and object localization
    * Geometric modelling

Depending on the evolution of the meeting, these discussions can
already start on Saturday, run in parallel, extended with other
topics, etc.

A sandwich lunch will be provided.


3. Hands-on session
===================

I originally planned to have these on Monday 3rd and Tuesday 4th. But
in the meantime I got a very hard interrupt for that Monday, so I
would like to reschedule these things to _before_ the meeting.
Moreover, only three people have shown interest, so that I think we
should define the agenda of these sessions according to the interests
of the participants. Roughly speaking, my idea was to go through the
real-time Linux code that we have already developed the last year, and
discuss and hack it. I.e., some device drivers, simple motion and
force control, practical problems and issues, etc.

Please, all people that would like to participate in the hands-on, let
me know whether you prefer a one-day  (friday) or two-day  (thursday +
friday) session, and your possible preferences as far as topics for
the hands-on are concerned.

The hands-on is also open to graduate or PhD students that don't
attend the Orocos meeting.


4. Accomodation information
===========================
Hotel information can be found by navigating the Leuven website
<www.leuven.be>.
I am willing to help you find accomodations (without wanting to
become a real travel agency though).


I hope we will have a stimulating and productive meeting!


Best regards,

Herman Bruyninckx