David Lobato

Carspeed 5.0

2010-03-08T07:11:00.000-08:00

Carspeed 5.0 is my master's project. The idea is to port the current carspeed, developed in the URJC Robotics Group, to jderobot 5.0, the experimental version of our robotics middleware. Jderobot 5.0 is in an early development state, so porting carspeed will help us to verify the non-functional requirements we are trying to get in terms of performance, inter-machine distribution and usability. It will generate valuable feedback to add new functionalities and to test the existing ones.

That's a preliminary version of carspeed 5.0:

In the video we can see how an area of the road is selected and rectified. The rectified image gives us an overhead perspective of the road that will let us estimate distances according to a standard coordinate system.

jderobot meets Python

2009-06-26T00:24:00.000-07:00

jderobot is now able to load Python code with a new command "aload" allowing any kind of script to be loaded and executed inside an embedded interpreter. Thank you to the Python/C API this task has been easier. Most of the code to do it can be found here.

Now to load a Python script is as simple as:

jderobot $> aload hello.py

Loading hello.py...

Hello world!

jderobot $>

Future jderobot4.4 will be able to load schemas programmed in Python through Swig wrappers. Almost all the API will be available within Python and schemas will be able to "talk" to other ones, no matter their programming language.

Autoloading a module

2009-03-26T10:08:00.000-07:00

Some time ago I made some tests on dlopened modules, trying to find some simple autoloading mechanisms. The usual way we were using dlopen was followed by a dlsym calls collection. This way you can get functions defined inside the module. But this forces the application to know the searched symbols names.

An easy way to avoid this is letting the module to register itself, providing some registering mechanism, on loading time. So the only requirement is some kind of constructor called inmediatelly after dlopen call. gcc function atributes in C and variable initialization through functions in C++ are really easy ways to get this pourpouse.

More info can be found here.