[Fedora Robotics] p/s/g demo client program

Tim Niemueller tim at niemueller.de
Tue Aug 5 18:09:52 UTC 2008


Jeff Spaleta schrieb:
> On Tue, Aug 5, 2008 at 5:29 AM,  <jesusfreak91 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I realize the above sounds pretty similar to playerv, but I can't think of
>> what else to do that would meet our needs as I understand them.  Any
>> suggestions/comments/critiques would be greatly appreciated.
> 
> I think the goal is to provide a simple, constrained demo that someone
> can start up via a desktop icon, interact with, and not get lost in
> even if they haven't used player before.  Is the playerv interface
> robust enough for that?

Agreed!

> Here's what I'd like to see in a 2-D demo:
> a simple robot with a range finding ability, and marker identification
> a somewhat simple but randomizable 2-d maze environment for it to move in.
> a goal for it to achieve... "get from here to there"... or "find a
> specific marker"

For the beginning I would even implement just a manual motor control.
Like "drive forward". This depends on the robot type and it's type of
movement (omni, synchro, differential). So I would postpone the
autonomous part for now. This is the more interesting thing, that we can
do once the infrastructure is in place. Yet for users manual interaction
is more exciting for the beginning anyway.

For all the robots that I got my hands on up to now the first thing was
to use or implement a manual control to get a feeling for the robot.
Then the autonomous behavior was developed.

> the ability to turn the whole map on or off so its either visible or
> invisible to the user.
> with the map on the user just drives around the little robot like its an rc car.
> with the map off the user has to interpret the robots actual data
> inputs and figure out where to go...so its sort of a game...be the
> robot's brain.

Yes, that is a good idea. Is playerv modular, so that we can re-use its
widgets for our application?

> An interface with a crap load of tool-tipping concerning the controls
> and data-streams that help introduce player concepts to demo users.

Yes, that is a really good idea. We could also integrate links to say
Wikipedia.

Here is another thing: I've been working on a robot control software
over the last two years that we use on all of our robots. We are going
to release the trunk as Open Source software some time this year. It
should be easy to integrate it with player. It provides a Lua scripting
environment for behavior control. So we could provide on-the-fly
scripting of the behavior later on, once a set of basic abilities has
been implemented. This way you can program "missions" for the robot to
accomplish quite easy.

	Tim

-- 
    Tim Niemueller <tim at niemueller.de>      www.niemueller.de
=================================================================
 Imagination is more important than knowledge. (Albert Einstein)




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