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Acknowledgments

The Origin of Tekkotsu

Tekkotsu is an open source platform developed primarily at Carnegie Mellon University with contributions from other individuals and groups around the world. With funding from the Sony Corporation, we sought to develop animal learning models on the AIBO, but we had no experience with AIBO programming. So to get us started, Professor Manuela Veloso kindly shared her robot soccer program, CMPack'02, with us. Her graduate student, Scott Lenser, provided much handholding and support in the early days.

The result of our work on modeling animal learning was a realization that we needed more infrastructure for general-purpose application development on the AIBO. Hence, Tekkotsu was born.

Tekkotsu's early innovations included a centralized event router architecture, the ability to share C++ objects and methods across processes (despite Aperios' lack of a fork system call), a pipelined vision architecture with on-demand evaluation, a state machine formalism that is integrated with and makes full use of the Tekkotsu event mechanism, and a number of GUI tools for better control and feedback.  Recently, we have added fully featured kinematics to support continuing research into manipulation strategies, and have a number of other projects in development.

We continue to rely on two important modules from CMPack: the CMVision library for low-level vision and color image segmentation, and the WalkMC routines for locomotion. These modules fall under the CMPack'02 license, basically the GNU GPL, with some exceptions for Sony.  The rest of Tekkotsu is released under the standard GNU LGPL.

We would like to thank the following contributors:

  • Harm Aarts and Niels van Hoorn - Region Viewer
  • Sylvia Arifin - Website design
  • Douglas Blank - Patch for throttles and a new !select variation
  • Ken Dwyer - vision train won't save files outside of tools/seg directory
  • Neil Halelamien - AIBO Ophthalmologist 2003-2004, Visual Routines and Dual Coding
  • Daniel Höh - ftpupdate bug fixes, LoadSave cleanup and extensions
  • Bryan Johnson and Erik Berglund - UDP networking
  • Latika Kirtane and Kate Libby - Network Status report and Looking Glass project
  • Alexander Klyubin - bug fixes and prototype sound streaming
  • Alok Ladsariya - research assist. 2001-2003, lead Vision coder, also created networking code from scratch, wrote the vision threshold trainer, MATLAB tools, and much more.
  • Nuno Lopes - missing libjpeg from convertmot Makefile
  • Daishi MORI - Patches for ERS-220 support
  • Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Sciences, 2004 Computer Science team project: "The Sony AIBO: Using IR for Maze Navigation" (available from the Bibliography page)
    • Team members: Kyle Lawton and Elizabeth Shrecengost
    • Team project leaders: Zhan Shi and Ethan Tira-Thompson
  • Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Sciences, 2003 Computer Science team project: "See, Spot; Run" - Walk parameter editor and line following (available from the Bibliography page)
    • Team members: Haoqian Chen, Elena Glassman, Chengjou Liao, Yantiamn Martin, Lisa Shank, Jonathan Stahlman
    • Team project leaders: P. Matt Jennings and Ethan Tira-Thompson
  • Ignacio Herrero Reder - VisionObjectEvent boundary boxes, camera frame number field and fixed bug with missing deactivate events for visObjEGID
  • Akkarit Sangpetch - Storyboard Viewer (state machine visualization and logging)
  • Paris Smaragdis - sound input
  • Steve Smith - SUSAN edge detector
  • Thomas Stepleton - Chief Canine Cartographer 2002-2003, and prototype world model code. Tom also created the Tekkotsu logo.
  • Jordan Wales - Iconic Vision Guru 2003-2004, Visual Routines and Dual Coding
  • Benjamin Wu - VisionObjectEvent returns width instead of height
  • Also see our list of groups using Tekkotsu

Bundled Libraries

  • CMVision (GPL, Jim Bruce) - color segmentation, RLE compression, region statistic extraction
  • CMPack'02 Walk (GPL, CMU RoboSoccer) - a parameterized walk engine, allows a variety of gaits
  • newmat 11b (freeware, Robert Davies) - matrix library with some numerical funcations
  • ROBOOP 1.22 (LGPL, Richard Gourdeau, et.al.) - object oriented kinematics library (we have contributed AIBO-specific code for faster forward and inverse kinematics)
  • UPenn Walk

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CVS status

STABLE
Prototype TeRK and Lynx Motion arm support, revamped particle filter & tutorial, MapBuilder, Pilot, and configuration system (tracker)

Recent ActivitySyndicated

don't pollute global space (ejt)

Modified: Events/DataEvent.h

adding no-op operator>> for stuff thrown as DataEvents (ejt)

Modified: aperios/MMCombo/MMCombo.cc

On second thought, this should probably be a no-op (ejt)

Modified: Shared/{RemoteState.cc, RemoteState.h}

minor change, may reduce crash during thread race issue? (ejt)

Modified: aperios/MMCombo/MMCombo.cc

fixing include path from project directory (ejt)

Modified: aperios/bin/{libpng-config, libpng12-config, xml2-config}

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Last modified: 2007-08-21