Re: Questions about cameras and PlayerStage sensors

On Friday 01 July 2005 11:03, Artem Orlov wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> Does anybody try to get sensor data from robot simulator such as
> PlayerStage http://playerstage.sourceforge.net ? Are there device
> drivers for Orocos supporting PlayerStage's sonar, lazer and camera
> sensors?

No. The scale on which the software works would even be the other way around,
meaning that an Orocos controller would work as a 'server' (that would be a 
'player' ?) in playerstage, allowing it to be used in a distributed P/S 
application. To be concrete, the Kuka Robots we hacked are controlled by an 
Orocos Control Kernel, which could be wrapped in P/S to allow remote control.

>
> Recently I have written a simple driver for sonar sensor but I have
> faced a problem of data synchronization between a sensor proxy and
> PlayerClient connection. May be somebody knows more weak points?

Did you hope to use this sensor as an Orocos Sensor component ? 
It is not a bad idea at all, but for now, interoperation with P/S is on the 
'wishlist', but our lab is not implementing it in the near future since we do 
not (yet) use P/S to control our mobile robots.

>
> One more question. How can I get a video stream from any camera (USB,
> FireWire, PCI framegrabber) within Orocos? I could find no device
> driver for it. Clips from the applications site
> http://www.orocos.org/applications.php show that Orocos developers use
> cameras although.

We do not use Orocos directly to consume video streams. External libraries 
interprete the stream data and through a custom Sensor Component, provide it 
in a Control Kernel usable data structure, which is then used by the 
Controller or Generator of your feedback loop. We have thus not yet written 
'fat' components which can handle transparent interoperation with other 
software libraries, although the Orocos infrastructure probably needs no 
adaptation to accomodate such components.

Peter

-- 
K.U.Leuven, Mechanical Engineering, Robotics Research Group
<http://www.orocos.org> Tel: +32 16 322772