Here are videos of a students’ project of a tracker robot that relies on an external kinect sensor driven through ROS. The kinect observes the whole scene. A PhaROS-based node controls the robot to track a ball based on the the kinect output. When no ball is detected, the robot goes back to a home position.
Ball Following Behavior
Go Home Behavior
Tracker Camera View
We have already reported about a team of our students competing for the 2014 edition of the Eurobot contest (french chapter). The project where they have been using PhaROS is now over. Below the last videos. Hopefully a new team will be continue the effort next year and build up on what has been done so far.
IronMines Bot in the lab scoring 4 balls and 1 triangle
IronMines Bot in the lab scoring 1 ball and 2 triangles
IronMines during the competition
Xuan Sang Le is a PhD student who has joined our team mid-february. His work is co-supervized by Ecole des Mines and ENSTA is about speed optimization of Smalltalk robotic software by means of FPGAs. The first step is to develop an application fully in Smalltalk and our PhaROS Robotics framework that will serve as a reference for our metrics. The app we have chosen is a simple tracker robot that follows an object of a particular color. Beside being fun, the result shown by the video below is interesting. As we have initially expected we can’t pretend to be real-time. Still, Pharo is capable of fetching an image through wifi, process it and discover the position of the object 650 milliseconds. And this is with non-optimized code. Figures are likely to be better after optimization.
A team of our students is competing for the 2014 edition of the Eurobot contest (french chapter). Their PhaROS-based robot came to life. You can see it in action in the videos below.
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!
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 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!
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
We are now really glad to present an enhanced way to deal with PhaROS.
Since we want to keep with the ROS community spirit of collaborative development for robotics, we introduce now our own command for managing packages made in PhaROS.
This command is mean to install existing packages and create new packages with cool snippets and examples for going faster through the learning time.
PhaROS tool is made completely in Pharo smalltalk and it allows to deploy an existent package into a pharo 1.4/2.0/3.0 in any distribution of ROS that uses catkin package. It automatize the generation xml, makefiles, type and scripts creation, going on the direction of letting the pharo programmer to focus just in programming and not in infrastructure stuff.
For Installing and Using please check this post: using-pharos-tool
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.