RobotFlow 0.2.6 review

RobotFlow is a mobile robotics tookit based on the FlowDesigner project

License: LGPL (GNU Lesser General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Dominic L?tourneau

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RobotFlow is a mobile robotics tookit based on the FlowDesigner project. FlowDesigner is a data-flow oriented architecture, similar to Simulink (Matlab) or Labview that is free (LGPL) and versatile.

The visual programming interface provided in the FlowDesigner project will help people to better visualize & understand what is really happening in the robot's control loops, sensors, actuators, by using graphical probes and debugging in real-time.

The work on RobotFlow has begun in september 2001 as an University of Sherbrooke project in the Mobile Robotics and Intelligent Systems Laboratory (LABORIUS). The work on the project still continues and will become available to everybody through SourceForge as a LGPL project.

We hope with this toolkit to create a standard & open platform that all people from hobbyists to researchers could use and improve over time. It primarily supports Linux/Unix using the GNOME GUI.

The FlowDesigner & the Robotflow toolkit are written in C++ and provide fully customizable control and processing blocks :

- Drivers & interfaces for Pioneer2 Robots
- Vision processing algorithms (color training & tracking, etc.)
- Player / Stage simulator drivers for FlowDesigner/RobotFlow
- Signal processing algorithms (audio + video)
- Basic Behaviors
- Fuzzy Logic control
- Artificial Neural Networks
- Embedded super blocks (subnets, iterators)
- Basic networking (TCP/IP, broadcast)
- Device control (Sony EVI-D30, SICK lasers, etc.)
- Finite State Machine (beta)

Networks created with the visual interface called "flowdesigner" can also be run as scripts (with no graphical interface), enabling robots with lower resources to fully take advantage of FlowDesigner / RobotFlow. FlowDesigner provides an easy way to create your own data types/structures and blocks as toolkits.

What's New in This Release:
This release was updated to work with FlowDesigner 0.9 and MARIE 0.4.
A RobotFlow namespace was created.
OpenCV 0.9.6 library support with image tracking (text, color, features) and face tracking algorithms was added.
New behaviors are included.
Configure scripts were updated.
The SNCRZ30 RS-232 driver was fixed.