GenoM (was: Modelica)

Herman Bruyninckx wrote :
| I indeed had something larger in
| mind: in my view, a modern robot control system consists of several
| computer systems controlling different parts of the robot system (the
| `classical' robot arm or mobile platform; `intelligent' sensors such
| as vision systems and autonomous localization modules; a
| planning/trajectory generation componente etc.). The specifications
| for each of these I am currently developing on the web page (far from
| finished!).  Hence, in general, there will be several more or less
| independent software tasks running (``threads,'' ``agents'',
| ``components'', ``holons,'' or whatever name they are given), and each
| of these tasks has a certain `state'; this state has to be
| initialised, (re)configured, sent to other components for diagnosis or
| information exchange, etc. All this complex data management (as you
| aptly called it) requires a `language', and XML seems to be the
| appropriate settings to make this language.

Hi,

Just jumping into this, I wanted to mention that, within the context of
Orocos, we (LAAS) are thinking of a tool we've been successfully
developping and using for complex systems design for about five years
now. It's called GenoM (Generator of Modules) and is designed to help the
design of real-time architectures.

Further details on this tool can be found at
http://www.laas.fr/~sara/RIA/RIA-genom.html
and there's also a general paper about our vision of what should be the
architecture of a robot and how we've been developping it at
http://www.laas.fr/~felix/publis/ijrr97

Of course, we want to propose this tool and not impose it. We are
already considering several new developements. The most important one
would be to release it under open source license :) but we are also
considering using e.g. CORBA for communication or XML for display.

The kick-off meeting should be the best place to get into the details,
but since people started speaking about tools and software, we thought it
was necessary for us to announce our plans :)

Regards,
-- 
Anthony Mallet