November archive

Fedora now includes Fawkes

Recently we proposed Fawkes for inclusion into Fedora. The review has completed and the package has been accepted! Fawkes and its development environment can now be installed out of the box, see the download page for instructions.

On a related note Fawkes has been chosen by the Fedora Robotics SIG to play a major role in the Fedora Robotics Spin along with Player and Stage. The main idea of this spin is to have software on a LiveDVD providing a ready-to-use robotic simulation environment, with a demo application to introduce users step by step to the available software. Additionally as much robotics related software as possible, ranging from packages for hardware access (laser scanners, robotic arms) and robotic middleware frameworks, to full-blown simulation environments and libraries relevant for robotic applications like vision processing or task control will be added. The Robotics Spin has been proposed as a Fedora 15 Feature.

For this LiveDVD Fawkes will be used in combination with Player and Stage to provide the environment for the demonstration application. In particular, the behavior engine based on Lua will be the tools used to guide the user to complete tasks of increasing complexity within the Stage simulation environment. Among others like Player/Stage and the RoboCup 3D Soccer Server Fawkes will be one of the highlighted robot software packages.

Posted by Tim Niemueller on November 16, 2010 18:09

Video of talk about the Behavior Engine

Recently, I held a talk at Willow Garage about my recent efforts of porting the Fawkes behavior engine to ROS. It gives a brief introduction to Fawkes and explains the basic concepts and what one has to keep in mind when porting the behavior engine, and why Fawkes' architecture is beneficial for knowledge-based systems. It continues with an introduction of the behavior engine stack and the effort to port it to ROS using roslua, also written by the speaker.

This work was conducted as part of my research stay and internship at the Robotics Institute of the Carnegie Mellon University in the Personal Robotics Lab at Intel Labs Pittsburgh with Prof. Siddharta Srinivasa.

Posted by Tim Niemueller on November 12, 2010 15:53

Fedora review request filed

A review request has been filed to include Fawkes in Fedora. This is a major step and the driving factor for the system wide installation support which was added in Fawkes 0.4.

Once the package is included in Fedora, it will provide its users with the ability to run Fawkes out-of-the-box and start developing quickly. It is also one of the corner stones for the planned Fedora Robotics LiveCD by the Fedora Robotics SIG. It is envisioned to contain a complete simulation environment based on Fawkes, Player, and Stage. A demo application will introduce newcomers step by step to robotics and the related software systems.

Posted by Tim Niemueller on November 1, 2010 20:45