I can't believe we've let it slip for this long, but finally this release
arrived. Being planned for release somewhere 'the end of April', this hardly
can be called 'agile development'. I previously thought a good time for
release is when the code didn't change for about a month, and although we had
such moments, that was only because I lacked the time for processing the
ever-flowing in-pipe of bug reports and proposed fixes. It seems I'll have to
find another measure to get us back in the fast-track... The series of
changes is long and it hasn't always been easy to maintain backwards
compatibility. See below for a link to the possible issues you may encounter.

The result of a master thesis: connecting Blender with OROCOS to execute milling tasks.


The demo was filmed by the students with a small camera. Sorry for the shaking at times !

The ACM research group of the K.U.Leuven used Orocos Real-Time Toolkit as framework for an involved robotics application as well as Orocos Bayesian filtering library and Kinematics and Dynamics Library as detailed in this paper.
The experiment consists of a complex task—“human-aware task execution”—involving two robot arms, five PCs interconnected by ethernet, and half a dozen or so sensors.

The Flander's Mechatronics Technology Centre (http://www.fmtc.be) has
released a toolbox for creating Orocos components in Matlab/Simulink. It
lets you generate from Real-Time Workshop a ready to use component from a
Simulink model. The toolbox works for Simulink in Linux and Windows and comes
with a Windows installer and a user manual. A component generated with this
toolbox can be immediately compiled and loaded in an Orocos application,
without the need to write extra code.

The Berlin Racing Team of the 2007 Urban Grand Challenge Competition is using the Orocos Real-Time Toolkit as framework for building software components. They are one of the semifinalists selected by DARPA. There is an impressive movie (84MB) of this car in action.
You can read more about the use of Orocos on their website. See also their main page for a full overview of this project.
The core of the team consists of researchers and students of Freie Universität Berlin working together with partners from the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft (IAIS), and Rice University in Houston, Texas.

This is the first bug fix release of the Orocos Components Library v1.4
and only contains backwards compatible fixes.

The Orocos development team is pleased to announce the first bug-fix
release of the Real-Time Toolkit v1.4, a C++ toolkit for building
component based, real-time robotics and machine control applications.

With quite some delay, but in good shape, the new RTT and OCL releases
have arrived. We decided to set the 'major' version numbers (1.4) of the RTT
and OCL equal, such that it is easier for users to match them.

Most importantly, Debian 'etch' packages are available thanks to a very
helpful user. We provide the RTT for standard Linux (-gnulinux) RTAI/LXRT
(-lxrt) and Xenomai (-xenomai). The OCL is currently only available for
standard Linux and LXRT. Also, not all OCL components are available yet,
particularly those depending on KDL. You can find them here:

 deb http://svn.fmtc.be/debian etch main

This release has been on the shelf for a while. Most work went into preparing
RTT 1.4.0 which will go out by the end of this month. So here go the official
release notes:

The Orocos development team is pleased to announce the second bug-fix
release of the Real-Time Toolkit v1.2, a C++ toolkit for building
component based, real-time robotics and machine control applications.

The first major-version KDL-Release is being prepared. KDL-1.0 will contain algorithms for rigid-body positions/velocity/force calculations and transformations. This part of KDL is not changed with respect to the previous versions.

There is a major rewrite and API change in the kinematic family section:

• The representation of a chain is changed.
• The usage of all the kinematic solvers is changed.