+1.  This is way cool.  Great job!

--patrick


On 02/10/2014 10:19 AM, William Woodall wrote:
> Very neat! Thanks for the contribution!
>
>
> On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 2:06 AM, Chris Zalidis <zalidis@gmail.com 
> <mailto:zalidis@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     Dear all,
>
>
>     We are happy to announce the first release (v0.1) of STDR
>     Simulator (Simple Two Dimensional Robot Simulator) ROS package. It
>     is a fact that a variety of robot simulators is available. Some
>     characteristic examples are the Player/Stage/Gazebo project,
>     USARSim, Webots, V-REP and many many others. We acknowledge that
>     these frameworks are state-of-the-art and provide a vast amount of
>     services, ranging from realistic 3D simulation to hardware
>     support. Though the prize you ought to pay is that they are either
>     extremely architecturally complicated and confuse the novice
>     robotics researcher or they require a lot of computational power
>     to provide realistic 3D simulation. In addition, almost all of the
>     pre-mentioned frameworks have a lot of dependencies that make the
>     installation procedure time consuming and sometimes impossible due
>     to dependency errors. What we envisioned was a simple simulator
>     that its installation wouldn't require more than a few clicks, one
>     that would allow the robotic researcher to materialize their ideas
>     in a simple and efficient manner.
>
>
>     That is why we decided to create STDR Simulator. STDR Simulator's
>     two main goals are:
>
>      *
>
>         It doesn't aim to be the most realistic simulator, nor the one
>         with the most functionalities. Our intention is to make a
>         single robot's, or a swarm's simulation as simple as possible,
>         by minimizing the needed actions the researcher has to perform
>         to start theirs experiment. In addition, STDR can function
>         with or without a graphical environment, which allows for
>         experiments to take place even using ssh connections.
>
>      *
>
>         STDR Simulator is created in a way that makes it totally ROS
>         compliant. Every robot and sensor emits a ROS transformation
>         (tf) and all the measurements are published in ROS topics. In
>         that way, STDR uses all ROS advantages, aiming at easy usage
>         with the world's most state-of-the-art robotic framework. The
>         ROS compliance also suggests that the Graphical User Interface
>         and the STDR Server can be executed in different machines, as
>         well as that STDR can work together with ROS Rviz!
>
>
>     We hope that STDR Simulator will be useful to the beginner
>     robotics researcher aiming at comprehending the area, as well as
>     to an advanced roboticist who wants to try his ideas in mapping,
>     navigation or path planning.
>
>
>     STDR Simulator is - of course - open source and can be downloaded
>     from our Github page
>     (https://github.com/stdr-simulator-ros-pkg/stdr_simulator) or
>     through the official ROS binary distributables
>     (ros-hydro-stdr-simulator). Since this release is the initial one
>     we expect things to not fully work, so it would perfect if you
>     could provide us with some comments / suggestions / bugs that you
>     discover. Our bug tracker is:
>     https://github.com/stdr-simulator-ros-pkg/stdr_simulator/issues.
>
>
>     Finally you can find a detailed description of STDR Simulator in
>     our wiki page or our website:
>
>
>      *
>
>         http://stdr-simulator-ros-pkg.github.io/
>
>      *
>
>         http://wiki.ros.org/stdr_simulator
>
>      *
>
>         Contact e-mail : stdr.simulator@gmail.com
>         <mailto:stdr.simulator@gmail.com>
>
>
>     The development team:
>
>      *
>
>         Manos Tsardoulias (administrator/developer), PhD in Electrical
>         Engineering (etsardou [at] gmail [dot] com)
>
>      *
>
>         Chris Zalidis (maintainer/developer), Student in Electrical
>         Engineering (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) (zalidis
>         [at] gmail [dot] com)
>
>      *
>
>         Aris Thallas (developer), Student in Electrical Engineering
>         (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) (aris.thallas [at]
>         gmail [dot] com)
>
>
>
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>
>
>
>
> -- 
> William Woodall
> ROS Development Team
> william@osrfoundation.org <mailto:william@osrfoundation.org>
> http://williamjwoodall.com/
>
>
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