The Robotics teams of the CEA LIST (France) are organizing some Tech days for our research partners. Since we are (heavily) using Orocos (mainly RTT, OCL) we thought that the Orocos community might be interested as well.

At the European Robotics Forum 2012 KU Leuven and Intermodalics are organizing a three-part seminar, appealing to both industry and research institutes, titled:

1. Introduction to state charts and reusable, modular task specification through the Orocos eco-system
2. Hands-on-1: getting started with rFSM state charts in the Orocos eco-system
3. Hands-on-2: getting started with instantaneous motion specification using constraints (iTaSC): reusable and modular task specification

For all information, you can consult the Workshop page

Bert Willaert, researcher at department of Mechanical Engineering at the KU Leuven, Belgium, has used OROCOS for a highly dynamic force-feedback application.


Click below to read more about this movie.

Taking advantage that quite a few Orocos users and developers were attending IROS 2011 in San Francisco, USA, an informal meeting was organized to get to know each other and exchange our experiences and use cases.

Among the attendants were people from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, that were showing live demos on robots like the PR2, the Kuka LWR, and the Kuka Youbot; NASA, that is currently using and evaluating Orocos in the context of the Robonaut 2 project; and PAL Robotics, that uses Orocos on their biped and wheeled robots REEM-B and REEM, respectively.

Meeting developers from the mailing list in person is always great as it attaches a face to the email. Moreover, getting the opportunity to learn about the other's challenges and success stories is great for identifying future collaborations and moving the Orocos community forward. We hope to repeat this experience soon, and with more of us!

The Orocos development team is proud to announce the fifth major release of the Orocos Toolchain. It's a fat month late, partly due to your maintainer being loaded, partly due to the had-to-fix-show-stoppers that popped up the last month. The end result is shining though.

The Robotics Demonstration and Test team, in the NASA Goddard Satellite Servicing Capabilities Office, used the Orocos ecosystem to control a Motoman SIA10D industrial robot to demonstrate autonomous visual tracking of both cooperative, and uncooperative, targets in microgravity. NASA robot visually tracking a free-floating, non-cooperative target

Based on the Orocos Toolchain v2.4.0, this release fixes the 'type mismatch' issue for Ubuntu Lucid users. Also other small fixes for the Orocos-ROS integration have been applied, such as a cmake problem when generating typekits and generating a correct header file name in the typekit/ subdirectory. This project is available on http://www.ros.org/wiki/orocos_toolchain_ros

A new major release of the Orocos Toolchain is available, the 4th since our 2.0 cycle started. This release confirms the trend of the previous releases: getting bugs out of the core libraries and extending/improving the tooling.

Notable improvements can be found in the rtt-lua scripting bindings, which is nearing its 1.0 release and widely used by now; a new appender for logging to Apache ChainSaw has been added to OCL's logging service; orogen/typegen has evolved further, including a generic POSIX mqueue transport and the RTT data flow implementation has been optimized to only have minimal copies of data. Various anoying bugs were fixed in RTT XML serialization, Taskbrowser and scripting.

A new bug-fix release is out, nailing down some of these annoying paper-cut class bugs. Click below to read the rest of this post.

The euRobotics Forum workshop on Orocos has been a great success. About 30
people attended and participated in the hands-on workshop. The Real-Time &
Open Source in Robotics track drew more than 60 people. Both tracks were
overbooked.

We would like to thank all participants for attending our workshop and the
enthousiasm with which they have completed it. We also appreciated the
feedback and we will certainly do something with that.
We have put all presentation material on-line on the workshop wiki pages,
see here for a direct link:
http://www.orocos.org/wiki/orocos/eurobotics2011/eurobotics-workshop-mat...