Overview

Overview
https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1Y0Bk0GLxnkwIieLmTmGreYPy6tla64GwUSCN29MmxwY/pub?w=362&h=306&.png

Technology Convergence

Our goals with rocon stem from previous forays aiming at making robots more capable and expressive in a networked environment. These preliminary experiments are now end of line, interestingly enough, for the very reasons that make rocon a much more practical prospect worth investing in. There is a real convergence in technologies recently


 * Smart phones have triggered extremely rapid growth in pervasive wireless technologies and embedded computational power.
 * Inexpensive 3d sensors providing enough information about the real world to be useful.
 * Robot middleware decreasing the effort in order to standardise on a communication layer.

These advances are contributing greatly to the feasibility of tackling the multi-robot-human-device problem. In particular, the hardware issues are becoming tractable, what remains is largely a software problem.

Our Focus

How to compose the system in such a manner so that it is 1) simple to setup, 2) flexible enough to enable a variety of interesting solutions and 3) not so rigid that it constrains experimentation in the area of orchestration. Currently solutions are typically one-off research lab demonstrations for which there is little focus on automating or at least simplifying the setup and configuration of a multi-robot-device-human solution. This is a void we intend to fill while at the same time creating the building blocks needed to support experimentation with a variety of different strategies at a higher level.

What will it look like?

That is a good question...Our focus is to make difficult things simple and be an enabler for higher level strategies. With this in mind, we are targeting a first real implementation and labelling it the orchestration platform prototype. A good visualisation can be found in those pages - keep in mind that they are development notes.

Areas

 * Concert Framework
 * Orchestration
 * Appable Robot
 * Rocon Interaction
 * Software Farm
 * Rocon Authoring