Started Labbook 2013.

December 5, 2012

The Baxter will be based on ROS, according to ROS news. Yet, it is not clear if simulation is part of the package.
Actually, also Aldebaran's Romeo is now supported by ROS, according to ROS news. Actually, the published a ROS stack. Looking at the stack, it is actually the Robot Contact Point description specifying the body of the robot, including the code to parse the file.

July 6, 2012

Found in the article 'Seven Big Ideas in Robotics, and how to teach them', a reference to a CMU Master thesis which uses a spider robot (Chiara) to play chess. Looked around at Tekkotsu Labs. Many nice code samples, not much teaching material (slides).

Found a Robotics course at Brock University, which also uses Murphy (and has a copy of Materic).

Started daemon on ow139, but I can start the umi and the student not (although I added him to the name_file). My hypothesis is that the uid is not known to ow139. Tried to compile a version of the daemon without name checking, but no gcc-2.95 is installed on ow139.
Tried to compile the daemon on mremote. There I have gcc-2.95. Make didn't work, because OSTYPE was no longer set . Added OSTYPE to Makefile.std. Now compilation fails on missing sys-includes.
Tried to compile with gcc-4.2.0. Got complaint: /usr/opt/linux-x86_64/gcc-4.2.0/bin/../lib/gcc/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/4.2.0/include/varargs.h:4:2: error: #error "GCC no longer implements ."
Default gcc (4.1.2) on U019948 compiles (but does not link). made a new hostlib.a and was able to link. Copied rtxd as rtxd_uncheched to /home/rtxipc/robot/linux.
Try to build a new GUI (with button next and move combined). make interface fails on missing linklist.h. linklist.h can be found in ../simulator. Make simulator fails on many errors in the includes. Should try with gcc-2.95.3.
make with gcc-2.95.3 fails on missing /usr/include/stdio.h

Put ow139 (u013570) back into the network (socket 61-1.07-17 in G0.18). Derk added the machine to the network database, which gave the machine dhcp-access. He gave the machi access to the home-directories. Still, I couldn't login. Seems related with delay in the reversed-dns (10 minutes delay). First access to /opt directories failed, afterwards only the NIS-service failed. Still no login. The changed the login from NIS to LDAP-security, which is the reason that login fails.
Proposal is now to make a local account.

Read an article about Answer Set Programming (ASP). In answer set programming a number of rules is reduced to a stable model without redunancy: the answer set. ASP is seen as alternative to Prolog. Would be interesting to see if tic-tac-toe could be solved with ASP (found only one project which tries to do this). Article lists a number of ASP systems: