Latest entries written by Tim Niemueller
Robotino Hackathon 2012
The IMA/ZLW & IFU Institute Cluster, RWTH Aachen University, the Knowledge-based Systems Group, RWTH Aachen University, and the Department for Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, Robotics Group, FH Aachen founded a new joined team to participate in the Festo RoboCup Logistics League
To kick off the team, and as a preparation for RoboCup 2012 in Mexico City, there will be a Hackathon from May 28th to June 1st (excursion week). The goal of this Hackathon is to integrate a robotics system based on the Robotino robot, that can complete certain logistics task in a restricted environment.
Who can participate?
Any student of the RWTH Aachen University or the FH Aachen can participate. Because of constraints in room and advisers participants will be selected among the applicants. Strong applications including good qualifying information is preferred.
Participants should be fluent in C++ programming. A background in robotics (lectures, programming experience etc.) is preferred but not required. Students must be eager to learn about new mathematical and programming concepts and to work in small groups on a particular topic.
What do we offer?
We can offer first-hand knowledge and experience in robot research and application development from an experienced team of robotics researchers. There will be introductory talks on the first day introducing the topics. On the following days small groups will work on the development an integration of modules on robot self-localization, navigation, computer vision, point cloud processing, behavior design, etc.
Some students will be selected to join us for the participation in RoboCup 2012 in Mexico City based on their work and team cooperation. There will be free Pizza and soft drinks throughout the Hackathon.
Background Info
The RoboCup Logistics League is a brand-new league sponsored by the German industrial manufacturer Festo. The goal is to solve problems in logistics with autonomous mobile robots in a competitive environment. Three Robotino robots per team have the task to transport material between production locations within the field of play.
When will the Hackathon take place?
The Hackathon will be held from
How to participate
To participate you will need to apply by email until May 13th 2012. Applicants will be notified by May 20th of acceptance or rejection. There are only a limited number of slots available. Applications will be selected based on the documentation handed in with the application.
To apply send an email to Tim Niemueller including information regarding your studies, semester, and about your background in (C++) programming, robotics, and relevant lectures.
Posted by Tim Niemueller on May 16, 2012 15:20
Repository now available via Git HTTP
The Fawkes git repository can now be cloned, for example, withgit clone http://git.fawkesrobotics.org/fawkes.gitIf you open the same URL in your browser you'll get the gitweb page. This is intended. Note that this method only works for public repositories. Other repositories offer SSH access only. The links on the download page have been updated. This should solve a problem for a new contributing team with their firewall.
Posted by Tim Niemueller on April 13, 2012 16:18
ROS Integration for Fawkes
Fawkes and ROS are robot software frameworks, each with unique features. Recently, we have added plugins to Fawkes to participate in the ROS ecosystem as a ROS node. Furthermore we have created rosfawkes. It encapsulates Fawkes in a ROS package for straight-forward inclusion.
The Fawkes ros plugin allows users of Fawkes to benefit from the wealth of code that is being written for ROS nowadays. Other components can access ROS and communicate with other nodes via topics or provide or invoke services. Fawkes plugins can be written that benefit from the focus and infrastructure on these closely implemented components, much like nodelets on steroids.
The rosfawkes package embeds Fawkes into ROS and provides a specialized main application embeds Fawkes in a ROS node. The package makes it possible to use all of Fawkes' libraries and tools in ROS nodes. For example, the ros-webview integration plugin allows ROS nodes to extend the Fawkes webview web interface.
With this code we have only made the first step, but an important one. We strive for an even closer integration in the future.
The basic installation instructions for the two ways of integration are described in the (preliminary) rosfawkes documentation.
Posted by Tim Niemueller on May 26, 2011 00:03
RoboCup German Open 2011
The AllemaniACs RoboCup Team has arrived in Madgeburg to participate in the RoboCup German Open 2011. This time they will participate in the RoboCup@Home service robot competition.
The robot Caesar is powered by the current version of Fawkes, in combination with an older software system called RCSoftX. Most teams are now employing Kinect cameras. For the AllemaniACs, support for OpenNI has landed in Fawkes just in time.
You are welcome to visit us in Hall 1 of the Messe Magdeburg to see robots helping in a household or to ask questions about Fawkes.
Posted by Tim Niemueller on March 30, 2011 12:38
Google Summer of Code 2011
The Fedora Robotics SIG has completed the Fedora Robotics Suite, a set of robotics related software packages that are readily available in Fedora Linux. Fawkes is one prominent member of this package set. The original idea also envisioned creating an educational application, where a user would learn step by step to control a robot, then instruct, and finally program it. The project could not be completed due to a developer shortage.
The project has now been proposed as one possible candidate for the Google Summer of Code 2011 with the Fedora Project as mentoring organization. If you are a student with a background in robotics and experience in C++ software development please consider applying for this project. The Fedora Robotics SIG comprises many developers of upstream software projects providing a good way to get in touch with those projects. It will also be a very visible feature of the Fedora Robotics effort providing a good show case for later applications.
To apply please read information on the Fedora GSoC 2011 page and contact Tim Niemueller of the Fedora Robotics SIG.
Posted by Tim Niemueller on March 23, 2011 12:20
Fawkes 0.4.2 released
The new GCC version 4.6.0 uncovers more issues than previous GCC releases. With this release, these have been fixed. These bugs did not manifest in typical operation. Additionally, Linux 2.6.38 drops support for Video4Linux version 1, and thus its (non-)existence must be detected. On newer kernels, only the Video4Linux version 2 interface is built now. The issues had been fixed in the master branch a while ago.
These fixes have now been backported to the 0.4 branch, in particular for the upcoming Fedora 15 release. It was detected by our continuous integration build hosts.
Posted by Tim Niemueller on February 22, 2011 12:05
Fawkes 0.4.1 released
In the last few months some minor improvements have been made that we want to share with this release. In particular packaging Fawkes for Fedora shed light on some shortcomings.- Manual pages
- All console and GUI tools now come with manual pages. They describe the available options more in-depth than the already existent usage instructions that you get when calling a tool with the "-h" parameter.
- Configuration files in user home directories
- Until now Fawkes expected a central configuration directory writable by everybody running Fawkes on the system. This is typical on real robots, but this can pose problems on multi-user systems, e.g. during development or using simulation environments. Now, the configuration can still be read from this directory, but information is stored in a .fawkes directory in the user's home directory.
- Enforcing undefined symbols
- On shared libraries and plugins undefined symbols were not enforced. This is the default behavior of the GNU linker. This can lead to plugins which cannot be loaded later. To uncover this kind of error earlier we now enforce all symbols.
- Fixes
- This release contains some minor bug fixes and adjustements for the latest version of libmicrohttpd.
Posted by Tim Niemueller on January 9, 2011 19:55
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
Fawkes 0.4 released
After one year of development and several RoboCup events to harden the system we are happy to release the next major release of Fawkes. Here is some info about the improvements compared to Fawkes 0.3:- System-wide installation
- The build system has been extended to provide support for system-wide installation. With this Fawkes can be packaged for direct installation on Linux distributions. Packages for Fedora are work-in-progress.
- Blackboard logging
- Plugins and tools have been written to log data written to the blackboard, replay and view the logs. This is important to record test data and later work on this data.
- Extended hardware support
- New hardware has been made available. A special camera module provides access to the extended functionality of the AlliedVision Pike camera. The SwissRanger SR4000 can now be used as Firevision camera to access depth images. And finally the Hokuyo URG laser range finders can now be used with the laser plugin and the plugin can provide multiple laser sources at the same time.
- Blackboard interface timestamps
- Blackboard interfaces now have a modification timestamp which is set either automatically by the writer or to a user-supplied value. Interfaces can be queried if data has been modified since last read.
- MSL2010 Refbox and SPL GameController 7 protocols
- The refboxcomm plugin can now communicate with the MSL2010 refbox and with the SPL GameController v7.
- World Info Broadcasting
- The world model can now broadcast world information instead of multicasting, which in some situations is more reliably and a requirement for some RoboCup leagues.
- XML-RPC plugin
- A demonstration plugin to access Fawkes via XML-RPC has been added.
- Line detection in laser data
- For demonstration purposes a plugin has been added to detect straight lines in 2D laser data.
Posted by Tim Niemueller on August 17, 2010 05:51
Final review of upcoming release 0.4
About half a year ago we made the initial Fawkes 0.3 release. Now we are close to releasing the next version 0.4, which contains several improvements and new functionality. For a developer's summary please have a look at the mailing list post. The code is currently under final review in the current-pre-0.4 branch, where all relevant feature branches have been merged and final fixes and cleanups have been applied. Everybody is invited to have a look at the code and give review suggestions before the release in about a week. Initial packages for Fedora have been built and with the release we will likely present binary packages for easy installation for the first time.Posted by Tim Niemueller on February 4, 2010 16:08
Added Fawkes screenshots
The screenshots show the most important GUI applications (though not all, will add more over time).
The config, plugin and netlog GUIs are the basic tools to configure a Fawkes instance on a robot, load and unload plugins, or view log messages produced by plugins respectively. All GUI applications make use of Zeroconf service discovery (using Avahi). It allows to conveniently present a list of robots on the local network and connect by a simple double click.
The SkillGUI is a tool to interact with the skill execution runtime. Skills are basic behaviors the robot can execute, like "goto to place x" or "grasp the cup". They are modeled using state machines which are shown for easy monitoring in real-time. The FireStation application uses the vision system for color training and visualization.
The webview plugin provides a web interface for Fawkes. It can be used to see the recent log messages, inspect the blackboard and manage the plugins.
The LaserGUI finally shows the raw data that the laser range finder gathered. In this case this is a rotating laser range finder (cf. RoboCup@Home wiki about Laser Range Finders). It produces a 15 scans per second with a resolution down to 0.5° between two consecutive beams. The beams can be visualized either by showing beams, or just the end points of the beams, or the hull. Each is useful for checking different problems or testing different applications. There is also a mode to visualize results of Masrur's leg tracker. Maybe we can put up a screenshot of this later.
Posted by Tim Niemueller on August 18, 2009 01:28
Fawkes initial public release
After RoboCup 2006, when the AllemaniACs of the Knowledge-Based Systems Group started to work on a new mid-size soccer robot, the decision was made to write a new software system. After almost three years it has evolved into a versatile robot software framework used on different platforms, real robots and in simulation.
Today we release the software as Open Source Software to the general public, in the hope that it will be useful to others and to build a community to create a joined effort to further improve and expand Fawkes. The now released software version 0.3 is a particular milestone for the project and its direction. It's an experimental base that we will now continue to improve making it easier to use Fawkes and to extend it by more robotics applications and tools. You are welcome to join the team!
Posted by Tim Niemueller on August 13, 2009 15:51
Fawkes Website Beta
A first version of the Fawkes website has been deployed on the real server and is currently in an internal beta test. Let me know what you think!Posted by Tim Niemueller on July 27, 2009 00:55
