Santiago Bragagnolo joined the team since the beginning of the month, as we announced during our talk on Smalltalk for robotics last ESUG conference (see slides below). Santiago is working full time on the RoboShop project where we aim at building an infrastructure for service robotics in the context of a shopping mall. We are using ROS (Robot Operating System) as a middleware. Currently, we are focusing on RoSt a framework to bridge Pharo Smalltalk with ROS. The end of the tunnel is becoming closer. We can call services provided by ROS nodes and we can send ROS topic messages. We are currently making tests with the ROS turtle simulator. We hopefully will soon start experimenting with our human size robots.
Tag Archives: robotics
Bot Grid Simulator Christmas Greetings
As a recreation for Christmas holidays, I hacked Bot Grid Simulator to render a winter landscape. It is still a robot simulation, since snow flakes are robots with a simple behavior. There about 500 of them. Hope you’ll enjoy the video. Merry Christmas and happy new year 2012.
Bot Grid Simulator Revival
Two weeks ago, I thought that it’s more than time to revive the work started by my former PhD student Van Tuan Le. His algorithms for on multi-robot cooperation were validated using Bot Grid Simulator (BGS). I posted a while ago a simulation that illustrates our ICTAI2009 paper (Distributed constraint reasoning applied to multi-robot exploration) that relies on the connectivity awareness as introduced in our ICRA2009 paper (Making networked robot connectivity-aware). However, the simulator was just a prototype and the code was mixed with other unrelated stuff. My goal is to make it clean enough so it can be reused by other people. I started a dedicated repo on SqueakSource with the latest version (number 13) of BGS as left by Serge Stinckwhich (co-supervisor of Tuan’s PhD) in fall 2009. Then, I started cutting off parts, refactoring others, and writing tests. Progress at the beginning was slow, but things keep getting better. By the 13th of november 2011, I had a first relatively clean and tested version (number 29) of the kernel. I made a youtube video to celebrate it. One week later, I improved the design and the GUI (version 37). Now, each robot has a heading and a range sensor that are represented graphically as shown on the new video. More to come soon hopefully :-)
Robotics & Pharo at the Free Software JM2L Event
I was invited to give a talk at the JM2L free software days (Journées Méditérrannéennes du Logiciel Libre) in Nice (French Riviera). My presentation (in french) that took place saturday the 27th of november was about Robotics & Pharo are availble below.