[robocup-worldwide] Release of the Carologistics 2014 Software

[Tim Niemueller]

Dear fellow RoboCupers.

Autonomous mobile robots comprise a great deal of complexity. To develop
a robust and capable integrated system for an environment like the
RoboCup Logistics League (RCLL) can be a tedious and longsome
enterprise. This can be a barrier for new (or rebooting) teams and slow
down even seasoned teams.

To foster the development of the RCLL and in the hope to inspire other
teams to do the same, we -- the Carologistics team [2] -- today release
our full software stack used for winning the RCLL 2014. It is centered
around the open source Fawkes Robot Software Framework [1]. While major
parts have always been openly available, the release we present today
also includes all parts which we developed in private specific to this
domain and which we considered a competitive factor. We provide this in
one coherent and tested package that will reduce the effort required to
get a full running robot for the RCLL tremendously.

Some of the highlights that the package contains are components for
localization and navigation, perception and vision, basic behaviors
(skills) using our Behavior Engine [3], and the complete task-level
executive based on CLIPS [4]. With the included simulation [5]
integration, you can immediately start and have a complete system that
performs the 2014 game on the same level as the current world champion.

The software has been developed for more than eight years by numerous
people and has been used in the Middle-Size [6] and Standard Platform
[7] soccer leagues, the RoboCup at Home league [8], the RCLL [2], and
projects aside from RoboCup, e.g. [9,10]. In the last three years the
Carologistics team [2] has been the major driving force developing the
framework and its components to its present state. It has been a joint
effort with the AllemaniACs RoboCup at Home team.

We invite teams to take a look and adopt Fawkes as their software
platform. All parts are Open Source software and the vast majority of
components are developed in the public. We welcome contributions from
anyone and hope to help newcomer teams to get a better start. In
combination with the now publicly developed simulation for the 2015
game, it should be far easier to perform better than ever before.

The release can be found at
   https://www.fawkesrobotics.org/p/llsf2014-release

We provide documentation at [11] that we are continuously improving,
especially [12] is relevant as it describes the setup of the simulation.
There are also instructions how to get the requirements on Fedora [13],
Ubuntu [14], or others [15]. Discussions and questions should be posted
on the Fawkes mailing list [16].

Regards from Aachen,
  Tim Niemueller


 [1] https://www.fawkesrobotics.org
 [2] https://www.carologistics.org
 [3] https://fawkesrobotics.org/p/behavior-engine/
 [4] https://www.fawkesrobotics.org/p/clips-agent
 [5] https://www.fawkesrobotics.org/p/llsf-sim
 [6] http://robocup.rwth-aachen.de/midsize
 [7] http://robocup.rwth-aachen.de/spl (was team ZaDeAt)
 [8] http://robocup.rwth-aachen.de/athome
 [9] http://www.ri.cmu.edu/publication_view.html?pub_id=7081
[10] https://www.hybrid-reasoning.org/en/projects/c1
[11] https://trac.fawkesrobotics.org
[12] https://trac.fawkesrobotics.org/wiki/Carologistics/Gazsim-Setup
[13] https://trac.fawkesrobotics.org/wiki/FawkesOnFedora
[14] https://trac.fawkesrobotics.org/wiki/FawkesOnUbuntu
[15] https://trac.fawkesrobotics.org/wiki/InstallingFawkes
[16] https://lists.kbsg.rwth-aachen.de/listinfo/fawkes-devel

-- 
KBSG - Knowledge-Based Systems Group            AllemaniACs RoboCup Team
========================================================================
http://robocup.rwth-aachen.de                     RWTH Aachen University
http://kbsg.rwth-aachen.de                               Ahornstrasse 55
http://www.fawkesrobotics.org                             D-52056 Aachen