[ros-users] ROS usability

[Michael Fritscher]

Hallo everybody,

just my 2 cents:

In my oppinion, the ROS core is fairly well documented and quite useable 
- both for beginners and advanced users. The problem are in my oppinion 
many of the packages. Most of the packages are more or less drivers for 
robots or middleware things. But even e.g. on the usb camera side there 
are at least 5 different drivers (see 
http://www.iheartrobotics.com/2010/05/testing-ros-usb-camera-drivers.html and 
http://pharos.ece.utexas.edu/wiki/index.php/How_to_Use_a_Webcam_in_ROS_with_the_gscam_Package 
) - why the heck we do need at least 5 drivers for a simple thing like 
capturing webcam pictures?! I know that there are different 
requirements, but forking isn't always the best solution...

Additionally, many plugins aren't that usable. Are little example are 
localization using 1 or 2 video cameras. viso2_ros doesn't need sse2, 
which is a no-go for ARM-cpus which are getting more and more popular.
PTAM is at least compiling, but it even fail to correctly display the 
video image (both on arm and on a normal x64 laptop). Sometimes it 
remembers me about https://xkcd.com/927/ ...

Another problem is in my oppinion the library-hell problem. ROS packages 
are tightly tied with specific library version (e.g. libboost) which 
(roughly) exists only on one specific distro-version. This makes it 
almost inpossible to use binary versions of ros on another distros. 
Perhaps this can be solved that the binary packages depend on e.g. 
"libboost-1.42 | roslibboost-groovy" - so either the distro-version or a 
ros-own version can be used.

Best regards,
Michael Fritscher

-- 
ZfT - Zentrum für Telematik e.V.
Michael Fritscher
Allesgrundweg 12
97218 Gerbrunn
Tel:  +49 (931) 3 29 29 54 - 21
Email: michael.fritscher at telematik-zentrum.de
Web: http://www.telematik-zentrum.de
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: michael_fritscher.vcf
Type: text/x-vcard
Size: 306 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.ros.org/pipermail/ros-users/attachments/20140220/306b0989/attachment.vcf>