Toolkit Engineering

Hardware related toolkits

To facilitate the use of state-of-the-art hardware found within the related research groups of CITEC, drivers and frameworks were developed at the CLF. The goal of these software packages is to allow easy access to the hardware while hiding as much as possible of the complexity of the underlying hardware. Some of the frameworks developed are:

• KUKA OpenKC SDK
• Schunk SDH 2.0 Tactile-Guided Grasps API
• Tactile Sensor Library (currently support for Myrmex and DSA (Weiss Robotics) Sensors)

Robot Programming

To enable a coordinated and sustainable development of research prototypes as well as providing a basis for the implementation of robotic software components and robot behavior the Central Lab Facilities provide toolkits to support researchers with their work as well as students to gain early experience with our robots.

• BonSAI: Bielefeld Sensor Actuator Interface
• BTL: Bielefeld Type Library
• ReSAI: Remote Sensor Actuator Interface

Infrastructure

Some common tasks in software developement and deployment as well as some toolkit functionality are frequently needed throught CITEC. The Central Lab Facilities serve as a central location for the ceaseless maintenance and development of solutions for such tasks. These include:

• GAR-Installer is an environment were software dependencies get listed solve them and to build the software
• APM,
• XAV-Stream a video and audio datastreaming tool to record and syncronisat videos for different camera devices.

Simulation

The development of new robotic hardware is a long and cumbersome process. The simulation of the robot or parts of it serves as a very helpfull tool and boosts the further developement, since it allows to test many different configurations and setups in a very efficient way while preventing unwanted damage to hardware components. Examples of simulation environments include:

• Blender- Flobi robot simulation
• Navigation in buildings analysis
  

Motion Capturing

Motion capturing is on of the main topics in intercation research. We use difference hardware like optical tracking systems, kinect and in normal cameras to track the motion. For the we developed some toolkits:

• viconXCF is the communication component of the vicon with the global communication framework XCF used in the CITEC.
• osg2MoCapQT4.lib contains the main components that are needed to integrate the motion capture hardware Vicon MX in a 3D View application.
• Pamocat is a pre annotation tool specialized on motion capture. It visualizes the multiple recorded participants and gives support to find special wanted joint aktivities.
• Kinect
• Simple Colorblob detector