On 8/24/2010 9:36 PM, Tim Niemueller wrote: > On 26.06.2010 13:12, Rich Mattes wrote: >> Hi all, > Hi Rich and all. > > I have been pretty busy recently but finally made it to reply. Thanks > for the great work on the Player package btw! > >> It's been a while since we've coordinated last. I think it's about time >> we get together for a status update, and identify what we should be >> working towards for F-14 onwards. >> >> So far we have the eventual goal of getting a robotics LiveCD together, >> and we've briefly discussed creating some demo programs for robotics >> education. We should continue brainstorming and narrowing down areas of >> development for these ideas. We've also got quite a list of interesting >> projects on the SIG wiki page, is anyone actively working on packaging >> any of them? > You're absolutely right! I'm personally working on packaging Fawkes atm. > We have just pushed the 0.4 release which supports system-wide > installation. The current package still has some issues that I have to > go through, but eventually I'll file it for review. It's on > http://fedorapeople.org/~timn/robotics/. > > Since Fawkes provides the whole stack, from the low-level system all the > way up to a scripting environment for the robot behavior, I think it is > a good candidate to form the base system. With Player and Stage in > Fedora, that should be our simulation environment for a start. Later we > can try more fancy 3D sims, but for the beginning that should suffice. > > In IRC meetings a few months ago we had this idea of a game-like intro > to the system, where you need to get the robot do something in the > simulated environment which we make more complex from level to level. > E.g. in the start it could be clicking for "go there" if someone comes > up with a GUI, or text commands otherwise. The hardest level would > require you to write a program that gets a more elaborated task done. > E.g. find a box in the environment. Check for the color of the box, > depending on the color, bring it to destination area A, B or C. That's > not what it has to be, but it's just to give you an idea of where I > would like things going. I want to get people interested in playing with > the robot. And once they're addicted we suck out their brain by making > them write awesome robot software :-) > > What 'ya think? What are your ideas? What do you (that's you sitting in > front of the monitor, yes, you!) want to see on a robot LiveCD and what > can you and do you want to do to help? > > Tim > Hi all, Very cool to see that Fawkes is almost ready for release, I remember you mentioning it a while back. I can try to play with it this weekend, and I'll be happy to look over the package for review once you submit it. No worries about the Player package maintenance, I'm happy to do it. In case you missed the announcement, I was brought on to the Player project as a maintainer, so I'm now serving as an upstream developer and helping with the maintenance of the Fedora packages. One of the things we've been talking about upstream is that Player would be a really good basis for robotics in education. With a bit of effort in documentation, curriculum, and tutorials we could easily have a very solid platform for teaching algorithm design and real-time coding strategies. Gazebo is still giving me a hard time, there's several dependencies that are not yet in Fedora, and one that kind of is but is part of a much larger package. I also need to submit an RFE to see if the bullet maintainers will enable double precision. I haven't forgotten about it though. I'm also very interested in packaging the Arduino IDE since I use it all the time, but it's doing to take some hounding to get upstream to do proper source tarball releases. And then I'll have to figure out the java packaging guidelines. Upstream has a ticket open on the tarball matter, so it may be in the works yet. The discussions we had in IRC the last time we met about creating some sort of 'game' environment for Player and Stage fit right into the educational goals discussed above. Tutorials and examples like Tim is suggesting would serve as a great jumping-off point for people to get started with robot programming. The availability of Python bindings to Player is also a boon to the effort; Python is a very easy language to pick up, is script-able, and can even be used interactively in the shell to control a bot (if you can type fast enough!) I'm happy to spend some time getting a plan together and running it by the rest of the Player devs, but I think that the goals of the SIG and upstream align quite a bit. As far as the live cd, I think we should obviously plan on including as many of the robotics packages as we can (mrpt, rcss*, opencv,p/s/g, gearbox, fawkes, urg, etc) on top of the base desktop image. We can strip out things like office, games and productivity, but adding the -devel packages and devtools is going to take up quite a bit of space. I'd also like to make sure that all of our packages are aligned with the latest upstream releases, and put a lot of effort into upstreaming any of the changes or enhancements we make. Finally, we should definitely submit it as a Fedora feature once we get our act together; F15/F16 timeframe is probably realistic. Regards, Rich _______________________________________________ robotics mailing list robotics@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/robotics
