[ros-users] communicating with windows

[Christian Verbeek]

 Dear all,

I would like to come back to the problem of communicating with a ROS
system from windows. Especially in commercial applications it is highly
appreciable to have a GUI for controlling, visualisation and
parametrisation running on a Windows host as 99% of customers in
industry run Windows. What ever one might think about this - its a fact
and can not be ignored. The robot itself is equipped with a powerful
Linux system running the whole ROS system.

It is true that setting up a bridge from ROS to some other middle-ware
like Ice is straight forward. On the other hand system complexity
increases a lot when using a bridge. Also at least in the case of Ice
licensing is a big issue when talking about commercial applications. The
Ice license is extremely restrictive (and expensive).

Some time ago I read about the intention to make roslib and roscpp OS
independent. Is this really a big issue? In the situation described
above one might need only a subset of the overall functionality. 
Starting in September 2010 I will have a trainee who's job will be to
shed some light on this ROS-Windows stuff. Maybe we can discuss the
steps to get roslib and roscpp compiling on Windows (using Visual Studio
2008 or later). Maybe someone started to work in this direction and can
give some hints.

Regards
Christian