[Fedora Robotics] player/stage demo program

[John McLean]

On Fri, 1 Aug 2008, Tim Niemueller wrote:

> John McLean schrieb:
>>
>> Hello all,
>
> Hi John.
>
>> I recently returned from my trip, and I'm going to start writing up a
>> demo program for player and stage in the next few days. I'll probably
>> write it in C, since the C library for player is the most documented (I
>> would write it
>
> Oh cool. I'm also back and have now some time to work on the Fedora
> robotics stuff, I will send an email about this tomorrow.
>
>> in python --much simpler-- except there is nearly no documentation
>> for the playerc module).  What are we looking for in a demo program in
>> terms of functionality?  Does it need to be interactive? What interfaces
>> should I include (ie. position, laser, ptz, etc.)?  I'm looking for a
>> general idea of what I should start with.
>
> I think this pretty much depends on what you can do. You cannot do any
> sensor data extraction in a few days if you are not experienced in
> robotics, but in the simulated environment you have already some data
> like position etc. that you can work with.
>
> The first thing is probably just interfacing with Player/Gazebo, output
> some data, make the robot do anything, so that you get to know how it
> works in general. There maybe something viable in the Player source as
> example, maybe?
>
I've been using player/stage, because I can't get Gazebo installed yet. 
The build process is outputting errors I don't understand enough to fix. 
If someone's got an rpm/srpm I'll install that.

There are several examples in the player source which I've been looking at 
that are helpful.

> A thing that should be pretty easy to do is have a small application
> (console or GUI, wherever you can excel) that allows for a simple
> movement of the robot. When you are able to drive around in the
> simulator remote-controlled that's already something! I don't know what
> you had in mind, to me a Pioneer model/world looks like a good start.
> It's pretty well-known and many will recognize it and comes with Gazebo.
> For the LiveCD we need something fancy with a nice GUI, of course. But
> this can also come at a later point.
>
If all we need is a small gui to control various parts of the robot (ie. 
motors, gripper) and receive data from sensors (ie. laser, sonar) , then 
playerv will do that job just fine as far as I can see.

> Does that help as input for a start?
>
And yes, this does help :)

> 	Tim
>
>