Dear orocos-user and orocos-developer,

With this email I want to announce the "geometric-relations-semantics"
software (http://www.orocos.org/wiki/geometric-relations-semantics-wiki).

The geometric relations semantics software (C++) implements the
geometric relation semantics theory, hereby offering support for
semantic checks for your rigid body relations calculations. This will
avoid commonly made errors, and hence reduce application and,
especially, system integration development time considerably. The
proposed software is to our knowledge the first to offer a semantic
interface for geometric operation software libraries.

The goal of the software is to provide semantic checking for
calculations with geometric relations between rigid bodies on top of
existing geometric libraries, which are only working on specific
coordinate representations. Since there are already a lot of libraries
with good support for geometric calculations on specific coordinate
representations (The Orocos Kinematics and Dynamics library, the ROS
geometry library, boost, ...) we do not want to design yet another
library but rather will extend these existing geometric libraries with
semantic support. The effort to extend an existing geometric library
with semantic support is very limited: it boils down to the
implementation of about six function template specializations.

The software already includes orocos typekits and already supports the
KDL geometry types and ROS geometry types.
Furthermore, it is fully Orocos and ROS compatible.

The wiki page
(http://www.orocos.org/wiki/geometric-relations-semantics-wiki) contains
background information, software design discussion, API, Quick start,
User guide, tutorials, FAQs, and use cases.

We will be happy to receive any kind of comments!

Kind regards,

Tinne De Laet

PS: The software is based on the paper "Geometric Relations between
Rigid Bodies: Semantics for Standardization" (available at
http://people.mech.kuleuven.be/~tdelaet/geometric_relations_semantics/ge...),
which is accepted for publication as a tutorial in IEEE Robotics and
Automation Magazine.