nasa releases claraty free robot

NASA CLARAty NASA has released a lite version of their Coupled Layer

Architecture for Robotic Autonomy (CLARAty) framework for robot

software development. The software is a collaborative effort among a

number of institutions including JPL, Ames Research Center, Carnegie

Mellon, and the University of Minnesota. The complete software suite

includes a large number of software modules for robot programming but

at the moment NASA is only releasing a subset of that functionality to

the public.

Primary functionality in these modules includes math

infrastructure, rotation matrices with Euler angles, quaternions,

and coordinate transformations (interoperable homogeneous and

quaternion transforms). It also includes the coordinate frame

infrastructure that connect transformations and mechanisms with

moving parts. Additionally, you will find mechanism models for

wheeled, legged and hybrid vehicles. Other modules include device

and device group infrastructure with support for generic digital

and analog I/O, cameras, and motors. Several modules in this

release provide vision infrastructure for images, color images,

camera models, 3D point cloud, and surface normal image

representations.

CLARAty is released under the JPL Open Source License which is a bit

different than the well known Open Source License that most of us are

familiar with. JPL's software license gives developers the right to

create applications for non-commercial use only. This should not be a

problem for most people who might want to use CLARAty since they will

either be in academics or amateur roboticists.

NASA is releasing the software at a time when there is much

competition in robot programming frameworks including among others the

popular open source Player/Stage, Microsoft's Robotics Studio and

Evolution Robotics' ERSP. Obviously all these players realize that

robotics is going to be a big thing sooner or later (actually that's

all the futurists tell us every day) and they want to be the ones that

develop the platform that will run all of these robots. The problem is

that we are getting fragmentation which for the time being will not

help us move forward fast. For example, CLARAty has some nice

components for visual tracking, path planning and 6DOF pose

estimation. If one already has a project in progress that uses the

Player/Stage platform then it would be nice if he could use these same

components. It doesn't help that the code must be ported from one

platform to the other which might or might not be a trivial job.

It will be interesting to watch how the market decides on a framework

for the upcoming robot age.

CLARAty layers