This page collects our efforts to write up the Project's Application form for the Gsoc. It's meant for the Google people and potential students. So don't expect expert readers here.

Feel free to edit and correct the answers to the these questions:

• Describe your organization.

Orocos stands for 'Open Robot Control Software' and is a unique software project in the domain of open source robotics. It aims in providing C++ libraries necessary for (real-time) robot control on an open platform. The main projects are the Kinematics and Dynamics Library (KDL, coordinates movement and positioning of a robot), Bayesian Filtering Library (BFL, a smart way of processing sensor data) and Real-Time Toolkit (RTT, infrastructure for writing robotics applications). These three libraries can be used independently, a fourth library, the Orocos Component Library provides application components using these libraries.

Our project was founded in 2001 at the university of Leuven in Belgium, Europe. Open source robotics was not that common as it is today. We aimed at real-time control (say reliable execution of algorithms at 1KHz) of robots and the first versions were demonstrated on industrial robots. Today, Orocos is used in many robotics fields such as industrial robots and machine controllers, autonomous vehicles and humanoids. Both users and developers are located around the world, although its birth-place, Europe, would still stand out if we put all of them on a map.

We aren't the only robotics open source project out there. What makes us unique to our users is that we are the only project that targets real-time control and also have a unique set of features, a bit daring some may say.

The project is very vocal on the mailing lists, given its niche size: over 300 people subscribe to our announce list, over 100 to our developer's list and over 50 to our users list.

• Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2009? What do you hope to gain by participating?

The universities using Orocos have a long tradition of hiring students to implement (or test) given features. The revolutionary RTT 1.0 release would not have been possible without all their accumulated efforts. We're not really in for the money, but for attracting new, very motivated blood, which wouldn't make it otherwise because the universities payrolls don't work across country borders.

• Did your organization participate in past GSoCs? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation.

We're first-timers. We didn't participate earlier because we thought it was only for the big-numbers projects, until we saw that some smaller projects also got a student or two. We got hope.

• If your organization has not previously participated in GSoC, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)?

We have never applied before.

• What license(s) does your project use?

LGPL and GPL+Linking exception

• What is the URL for your ideas page?

http://www.orocos.org/wiki/orocos/gsoc

• What is the main development mailing list for your organization?

http://lists.mech.kuleuven.be/mailman/listinfo/orocos-dev

• What is the main IRC channel for your organization?

#orocos

Not really used nowadays, but we have in the past when communicating with summer students.

• Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now.

Should we ???

• Who will be your backup organization administrator?

Herman Bruyninckx

• Who will your mentors be?

Peter Soetens, Herman Bruyninckx, Tinne De Laet, Markus Klotzbucher, Ruben Smits.

• What criteria did you use to select these individuals as mentors? Please be as specific as possible.

All our mentors are employed by and teaching at universities or have consent of their employer to invest time in these projects. That makes that they can help students also during day time. They were selected because of prior contributions and activity on the mailing lists. Three of the mentors are project maintainers and are ideally placed to help students and to defend their work for the rest of the community.

• What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?

Prevention is the best cure. Our idea is to have weekly reports, regular chats and address expectations/problems early on. Just like with regular students, only at a distance. In the worst case, we'd seek advice from Google as well in order to resolve the issues this student may have.

• What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?

Each Idea should have two mentors, but we're close enough to each other to take over from anyone. Given the team of mentors and their year-long contributions to the project, this seems unlikely to happen though.

• What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program?

We will reserve a separate web forum and wiki for the students and let them present plans and progress there at regular intervals. We will organize user groups that will respond and eventually test their code such that they get feedback in turn. If the students feel comfortable with IRC, we'll open and join an IRC channel.

The participating universities encourage their students to take a look at our project.

• What will you do to ensure that your accepted students stick with the project after GSoC concludes?

We'd recommend them to share their experiences with their school or university and hope that Orocos gets picked up there as well, for example, to be used in robotics student projects. They're welcome to stay on the development team and pick a piece of responsibility.