[ros-users] [Orocos-users] Joint controller manager

[Herman Bruyninckx]

On Tue, 29 Jan 2013, Adolfo Rodríguez Tsouroukdissian wrote:

>                   I am interested in learning
>                   whether there is het another "meta"-level on top of that
>             :-)
>             Good, keep us posted! We happen to be doing the same thing in
>             house the
>             last week(s)... More difficult than I thought at the beginning
>             to get it
>             "right" _and_ "reusable" in more contexts than just this one of
>             controller
>             management.
>
>             So, are you also implementing something similar?.
> 
> 
> yes! Azamat is taking the lead in this effort, and he showed me some
> prototype. It is not yet clear when something workable can be released.
>
>       Are there any additional valuable lessons that can be shared?.
> 
> I don't know what you call 'valuable' but the main reason that started
> Azamat's work is to get a computational support for "tree-structured
> algorithms with multiple sweeps", such as:
> - Model-Predictive Control
> - Bayesian networks, Markov random fiels, Factor graphs
> - control diagrams
> - tree-structured dynamical systems
> The common thing behind all these use cases are the things I mentioned:
> separating the schedule from the model and the execution; generate code
> from a domain-independent 'template implementation' with domain-dependent
> plug-in functions; (immutable) data management; deployment onto various
> software "containers".
> 
> 
> I'll keep an open eye on his work. The scope of his work is much broader than what I'm
> attempting here.

That is _exactly_ why we are doing it: nobody in the robotics community
seems to want to spend the effort to think (a lot) broader and further than
one's own "itch" :-) But if you do, as we did, you quickly find out that
_many_ sub-problems are basically the same.

BTW, this is the topic of the European PhD School in Robotics, that just
went on for the second time last week, and in which I try to educate the
participants with this mindset. And it works, tremendously well even! :-)

> Adolfo.

Herman