The past year has been a milestone for Orocos. Never in the history of Orocos was so much time and effort invested in inventing an easy to use tool for building control applications. Every one who had a part in this process can be genuinely proud. Gentlemen, start your controllers !

The Orocos development team is proud to announce the first stable release of the Real-Time Toolkit (RTT), a C++ toolkit for building component based, real-time robotics and machine control applications.

A new community website has been created in order to provide Orocos users a forum for collaboration and easier access to information.

The website features also the releases of:

* the 'Kinematics and Dynamics Library' (KDL) for calculating kinematic chains in real-time applications;

* the 'Orocos Components Library' (OCL) which offers components for hardware access (such as vision or force sensors), motion control and component management;

* the 'Bayesian Filtering Library' (BFL) which provides an application independent framework for inference in Dynamic Bayesian Networks.

The Real-Time Toolkit 1.0 allows rapid software component development and prototyping for control applications. Each component comes with built-in XML configuration, a real-time scripting interface, data ports for thread-safe data exchange and a user definable command interface.

The powerful Orocos 'TaskBrowser' component helps developers to run and debug their components, stand-alone or in a network and helps eliminating recompilation steps during development.