An example of a robotic guide at Ecole des Mines de Douai.
Category Archives: RoboShop
PhaROS @ FOSDEM 2014 – Video Presentation
As i already shout in the FOSDEM 2014 slides post, i have presented PhaROS in the last edition of FOSDEM, under the title of PhaROS: Towards Live Environments in Robotics.
I bring now to you this video taken during the presentation. I wish you to enjoy it!
Sorry if my hair is disheveled :), i am not very photogenic.
http://mirror.as35701.net/video.fosdem.org/2014/K4401/Saturday/PhaROS.webm
Enjoy it!
TaskIt: a Framework for Concurrency
As part of the PhaROS and related projects, Santiago Bragagnolo had developed TaksIt a framework for to ease handling concurrency. Expressing and managing concurrent computations is indeed a concern of importance to develop applications that scale. A robotic application often have different processes dealing with different activities (e.g. preception, planning, …).
TaskIT provides abstractions to schedule and/or parallelize of the execution of pieces of code. They will be described in the forthcoming chapter of the Pharo for the Entreprise book. First content is already available online. You can also get the code by evaluating the following expression in a Pharo workspace:
Gofer it
smalltalkhubUser: 'sbragagnolo' project: 'TaskIT';
configurationOf: 'TaskIT';
loadVersion: #bleedingEdge
PhaROS – FOSDEM 2014 – Slides
PhaROS has being in this last edition of FOSDEM (2014) we are proud to share our time and space with a lot of open source projects. Thank you very much for good feelings, feedback and sharing this amazing time.
Video and photos from this great event will be soon available here. Meanwhile, here are the slides
Keep tuned!
Using PhaROS tool
PhaROS tool has the mission of installing and creating packages into a ROS installation.
For doing this we have several commands, from installing and creating to administrating repositories, so you can manage your own packages and creating templates without major problems.
Install PhaROS tool
We are working for having this package in Ubuntu and ROS repositories, but meanwhile you can download it from here: pharos-deb
Once downloaded just execute
sudo dpkg -i pharos.deb
pharos –help
Install PhaROS based Package
pharos install PACKAGE [OPTIONS]
Example
pharos install esug –location=/home/user/ros/workspace –version=2.0
Help
pharos install –help
Create PhaROS based Package
pharos create PACKAGE [OPTIONS]
Example
pharos create –location=/home/user/ros/workspace –version=2.0 –author=YourName –author-email=YourEmail
Tip: Be sure the email is a correct one. If is not a correctly spelled one you will notice during last step.
Help
pharos create –help
Register Repository of packages
pharos register-repository –url=anUrl –package=aPackage [ OPTIONS ]
Example
pharos register-repository –url=http://smalltalkhub.com/mc/user/YourProject/main –package=YourProjectDirectory –directory=YourProjectDirectory
Tip: If your repository requires user/password for reading add –user=User –password=Password to the example.
Disclaimer: User/Password will be stored in a text file without any security.
Help
pharos register-repository –help
Listing registered repositories
pharos list-repositories
Creating a directory for your own project repository
pharos create-repository PACKAGENAME [ OPTIONS ]
Example
pharos create-repository example –user=UserName > directory.st
pharos create-repository example –user=UserName –output= directory.st
Help
pharos create-repository –help
Video of the Public Demo of Our Helper Robot in a Shopping Mall (16 oct 2013)
After initials tests we have made at the lab, we presented our RoboShop project on the 16th of October, as well as during 3 days from 21st to 23rd october in two different events outside our university. The stand was small. Yet we managed to successfully run our demo of a helper robot that targets shopping malls (see video below). We will be presenting even more demos to the public on thursday 28th november as part of the European Robotics Week. We will report them here. Stay tuned.
Our Robots Can Help You Shopping
In a recent experiment we demoed a scenario of how a robot can be used to help shoppers (see Video below). The robot computes the optimal path for picking items of an arbitrary shopping list. It carries the bag and guides the shopper to items locations. As we explain in the slideshow (below the video), there are other possible applications of mobile robots in a shopping. We also give a quick overview of hardware and software. We reused some existing ROS packages that we combined with our own software built using the PhaROS client based on Pharo a Smalltalk inspired OO dynamic language.
Video: A Robot Made to Help Shoppers
Slideshow about the RoboShop project
Robot Demo @ New Shopping Experience 4.0 – #vad.conext
We are pleased to demo our prototype of helper Robot in a shopping mall in Lille during the NSE4 event. The demo consists in guiding visitors to help them to pick products one as shown in previous videos of the RoboShop on this blog. Feel free to come and discuss with us, we are there until October, 24th.
First Tests of a Helper Robot in a Shopping Mall
At the ESUG 2013 conference, we presented the current status of the RoboShop project. Santiago did a great job and now we are able to run tests of our scenario of a helper robot in a shopping mall. Based on a map built using laser SLAM, the robot computes the shortest path to fetch items listed by a customer in a shopping list. The slides below include a video of the first tests. They also give a bird’s eye view of the architecture, where we use Pharo for orchestration. We also reuse existing software from the ROS community through our client PhaROS.
RoboShop Project: First Version of PhaROS is Available
In the RoboShop project, we aim at developing a platform for robotic applications in a shopping mall. We took the decision to use ROS, the robotic middleware backed by the Open Source Robotic Foundation. We also wanted to continue using our favorite language Pharo. This is how we end up developing PhaROS, a client for Pharo-based ROS nodes.
Today, we are glad to announce that the first version of PhaROS is now officially available, that is there is :
- Code freely available under an MIT licence,
- Tests shipped with the code, and
- Documentation : the first deliverable of the RoboShop project is dedicated to PhaROS
There is still much to do in PhaROS, and more broadly in the RoboShop project. But, so far we already have a PhaROS node that wraps the robot that we are using. We connected it to the gmapping SLAM algorithm and we have used it to buid a map of our lab. More to come soon.