Alana Lafferty
UAP Report
UAP Advisor: Professor Rodney Brooks and Dr. Una May O’Reilly
May 20, 2005
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The Orocos ProjectSmarter control in robotics & automation!
“Orocos” is the acronym of the Open Robot Control Software project. The project’s aim is to develop a general-purpose, free software, and modular framework for robot and machine control. The Orocos project supports 4 C++ libraries: the Real-Time Toolkit, the Kinematics and Dynamics Library, the Bayesian Filtering Library and the Orocos Component Library.
Orocos is a free software project, hence its code and documentation are released under Free Software licenses. The Mobile Robot Programming Toolkit (MRPT) is an extensive, cross-platform, and open source C++ library aimed to help robotics researchers to design and implement algorithms (mainly) in the fields of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM), computer vision, and motion planning (obstacle avoidance). The priorities are efficiency and reusability of code. The libraries include classes for easily managing 3D(6D) geometry, probability density functions (pdfs) over many predefined variables (points and poses, landmarks, maps), Bayesian inference (Kalman filters, particle filters), image processing, path planning and obstacle avoidance, 3D visualization of all kind of maps (points, occupancy grids, landmarks,…), etc. Gathering, manipulating and inspecting very large robotic datasets (Rawlogs) efficiently is another goal of MRPT, supported by several classes and applications. A proper and up-to-date documentation is another of the major goals of MRPT developers. Currently there are dozens of examples and several single-topic tutorials. A currently on-going project is devoted to write a “MRPT book” tutorial. The MRPT is free software and it is released under the GPL. Open Source Robotic ArmA five degrees of freedom robotic arm. Why this isn’t quite ready for sale: That said it is an amazingly fun toy to play around with, and a good starting point if anyone has ever had a desire to make the perfect robotic arm (it is open source so you’d be free to make and sell your own) For more details about becoming a Robotic Arm Developer visit our blog
The Katana Robotic Arm is typically used for handling, measurement, or testing applications in assembly, production, and laboratory automation, says Neuronics. The robot is billed as an “intelligent” industrial robotic arm with safety features that “allow it to work directly hand-in-hand with human operators without the need for any additional safeguards or fences,” says the company. The Katana is also touted for its ability to run as an an independent stand-alone unit, without requiring an external control host.
The new Linux version of the Katana allows low-level access to the robot’s Linux control board, and comes with system, communication, and motion libraries available as open source packages. This open source access provides application opportunities “that could hitherto only be met by developing highly expensive custom engineered robotics systems,” says the company. The Katana is based on a single-board computer (SBC) equipped with a PowerPC-based Freescale MPC5200 processor that provides 750 MIPS (millions of instructions per second) of performance, says Neuronics. The robot has six Texas Instruments (TI) TMS320 32bit motor controllers, one for each axis. Built around a CAN bus architecture, the robot also offers Ethernet and USB ports. The Katana is said to operate in three modes: control, standalone direct, and a standalone RPC/Web-services mode that supports technologies such as SOAP and Ajax for web-based control. The Katana’s control board Specifications for the Katana Robotic Arm are said to include: * Processor — Freescale MPC5200 Denx Linux and Xenomai The embedded Linux version of Katana runs a 2.4.25 Linux kernel (upgradable to 2.6.22) that is said to be optimized for industrial high availability. The robot has been developed with the Denx Embedded Linux Development Kit (ELDK) software development kit (SDK), an open-source Linux distribution and development tool suite that is especially popular in Europe’s industrial Linux community. Katana software architecture The Linux kernel is coupled with the Xenomai pre-emption and scheduling real-time add-on framework for Linux, which is supported by recent versions of ELDK. Xenomai provides “skins” for emulating API requests for different real-time operating systems (RTOSes). In the Katana implementation, Xenomai provides a development framework that cooperates with the Linux kernel to provide pervasive, hard real-time support to Nucleus-, kernel-, and user-space applications, says Neuronics. Neuronics offers a Katana Native Interface (KNI) C++ library for control application development “at the lowest interface level,” says the company. The KNI interface can be exported as a Python 2.5 binding, enabling Python development of native and external programs. A control interface is also said to be available directly on the robot, with interfaces in C++ and Python. For non-programmers, the company provides a GUI-based application programming interface (API) called Katana4D, which is targeted at industrial applications, and offers a built-in scripting language. Developers can move the robot arm into the desired position by hand, and Katana4D detects the position, generating the appropriate code, says the company. Katana4D is also said to provide AI algorithms for path optimization and adaptation, and can automatically convert applications to Python for deployment on the Katana in standalone mode. This month, Neuronics announced a “Katana UniKit” robot axis development board. The UnkiKit is said to offer 1-3 axes (axis controllers and motors), a CAN adapter, and a plug-and-play live CD with a customized Ubuntu Linux distribution. The distribution is said to offer sources, documentation, cross compilers and toolsuites for learning, developing, and modifying robotics applications. Aimed at research, education, and OEM robotics development, the UniKit can be purchased separately from the Katana. Founded in 2001, Neuronics is a spin-off venture from the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Institute for Informatics of the University Zurich. Availability The pricing for the embedded Linux version of the Katana starts at 19,500 Euros, or about $24,900 US, says Neuronics. No pricing or availability information was provided for the new Ubuntu-based Katana UniKit development board. More information on the Katana, including links to detailed information on APIs, patches, hardware, and more, may be found here. Text taken from: http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/Robotic-arm-runs-Linux/ USARSim is a high-fidelity simulation of robots and environments based on the Unreal Tournament game engine. It is intended as a research tool and is the basis for the RoboCup USAR simulation competition. USARSim models the 3 NIST reference arenas and the fixed NIKE Silo environment. The current version of USARSim includes models of the P2AT and P2DX robots by Activmedia, the AIBO and QRIO robots by Sony, the ATRVJr robot by iRobot, and the Talon robot by Foster-Miller. Contributed robots include the Zerg and Tarantula robots from the University of Freiburg. Kinematically accurate models of new robots can be added using vehicle classes from the Karma Physics Engine, a rigid multi-body dynamics simulator that is part of the Unreal development environment. The standard version requires the Unreal game engine bundled with Unreal Tournament 2004. By using a game engine, the simulator achieves high fidelity on commodity hardware. The Unreal runtime engine version uses a modified vehicle class. ROS is a meta-operating system for your robot. It provides the services you would expect from an operating system, including hardware abstraction, low-level device control, implementation of commonly-used functionality, message-passing between processes, and package management. It also provides tools and libraries for obtaining, building, writing, and running code across multiple computers. ROS is similar in some respects to ‘robot frameworks,’ such as Player, YARP, Orocos, CARMEN, Orca, MOOS, and Microsoft Robotics Studio. The ROS runtime “graph” is a peer-to-peer network of processes that are loosely coupled using the ROS communication infrastructure. ROS implements several different styles of communication, including synchronous RPC-style communication over Services, asynchronous streaming of data over Topics, and storage of data on a Parameter Server. These are explained in greater detail in our Conceptual Overview. ROS is not a realtime framework, though it is possible to integrate ROS with realtime code. The Willow Garage PR2 robot uses a system called pr2_etherCAT, which transports ROS messages in and out of a realtime process. ROS also has seamless integration with the Orocos Real-time Toolkit Surveyor SRV-1 Blackfin Robot Designed for research, education, and exploration, Surveyor’s SRV-1 internet-controlled robot employs the SRV-1 Blackfin Camera Board with 1000MIPS 500MHz Analog Devices Blackfin BF537 processor, a digital video camera with resolution from 160×128 to 1280×1024 pixels, laser pointer or optional ultrasonic ranging, and WLAN 802.11b/g networking on a quad-motor tracked mobile robotic base. Features
El proyecto de carácter didáctico consiste en un robot planar horizontal de 2 grados de libertad, actuado por 2 motores de CD y con dos potenciómetros de precisión como sensores, con una tarjeta de Adquisición de datos National Instrument PCI 6025E en una PC con plataforma Windows95 comunicándose vía TCP/IP con una PC con plataforma GNU/LINUX, la cual ejecuta el software de Control.
Autores:
Estudiantes del Programa Departamental de Maestría en MECATRÓNICA.
CINVESTAV. México, D.F. 1999
The OpenVulture project is a free and open source software package for controlling autonomous vehicles brought to you by the fantabulous 757 Labs team and the open source community. The primary purpose of this project is to provide a simple, free and nearly-dependency-free application (Vulture) and library(libvulture) to facilitate the software needs of an autonomous platform. Free, in the former case, refers to both freedom and cost. Such platforms (e.g. UAV, automated R/C car, etc) can be constructed cheaply and employ aspects of the OpenVulture software to act as the “brain” of the platform, steering it to waypoints and directing the platform in following pre-planed patterns/paths. |
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Copyleft © 2009 Software Libre e Ingenieria |
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