On Thu, 16 Feb 2012, Edwards, Shaun M. wrote:

> All,
>
> We are in the initial steps of setting up a consortium to support the
> development of ROS-Industrial (http://code.google.com/p/swri-ros-pkg/ ).
> We are nowhere near standing up the consortium, but assuming we are
> successful, SMACH is near the top of our list of ROS functionality that
> needs to be improved.  We will certainly work with the ROS community at
> large to further develop this tool, but the main goal of the consortium
> is to build on existing tools in a way that servers the needs of
> industrial users.

The industrial focus has been the major driver in the Orocos project, since
more than ten years now. Orocos has some mature features that industry
needs: hard realtime and efficient Coordination via FSM are two of the
features on top of the list.

ROS and Orocos can be used in nice synergy, with each focusing on its
strenghts. So, before putting again lots of efforts in reinventing good
wheels in one single framewrok, please take a good look at how one should
build multiple-framework applications, tools and systems.

> Shaun Edwards
> Senior Research Engineer
> Manufacturing System Department

Herman

> http://robotics.swri.org
> http://rosindustrial.swri.org/
> http://ros.swri.org
> Southwest Research Institute
> 210-522-3277
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ros-users-bounces@code.ros.org [mailto:ros-users-bounces@code.ros.org] On Behalf Of Wim Meeussen
> Sent: Thursday, February 16, 2012 12:04 PM
> To: User discussions
> Subject: Re: [ros-users] Current state of SMACH in ROS
>
>> So the official maintainer of SMACH is still Wim Meeussen, I handed it off
>> to him after I left Willow in late 2010, but I still jump in occasionally to
>> answer questions and fix bugs. SMACH is not actively developed (no new
>> features are planned at this time), but it should still be maintained. My
>> involvement has lapsed a bit over the past year, but I intend to get more
>> actively involved.
>
> I wanted to add to this that while SMACH is not actively developed at
> this time, we do support it and release it into every ROS
> distribution, and it still gets used heavily in both existing and new
> projects.
>
> Wim
>
>
>
>

-- 
--
   KU Leuven, Mechanical Eng., Mechatronics & Robotics Research Group
     <http://people.mech.kuleuven.be/~bruyninc> Tel: +32 16 328056
   EURON Coordinator (European Robotics Research Network) <http://www.euron.org>
   Open Realtime Control Services <http://www.orocos.org>
   Associate Editor JOSER <http://www.joser.org>, IJRR <http://www.ijrr.org>