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Open Source Software

"Open source" software allows access to the source code, so that you can fix bugs, create your own special features, etc. The code may or may not be free. You may normally redistribute the code, whether edited or not, but only as open source and with appropriate attribution.

Here is some great Open Source software, that many of us would be lost without!

• Debian and Red Hat Linux
• Perl
• Apache
• mod_perl
• MySQL

NASA's Ames Research Center (ARC) is pleased to announce the release of the EUROPA (Extendable Uniform Remote Operations Planning Architecture) software platform. EUROPA is an advanced constrained based temporal planning platform. Its architecture contains modules that can be used to solve problems in constraint satisfaction, planning, scheduling and combinatorial optimization. EUROPA can be downloaded from the EUROPA portal, which contains documentation, examples, pointers to EUROPA-related publications and provides access to EUROPA's code repository.
In addition, the group europa-users AT googlegroups.com has been created to host discussions about all EUROPA-related topics.

Eprints is creating the environment in which Open Access will become the norm for distributing research. For many years we have been helping researchers and their institutions to provide free online access to their research output (documents, multimedia and data). Within their site you will find information and resources to make open access a reality.

More robot-specific open source links

Orocos is a software framework with which to build advanced robot control software applications, with an emphasis on hard realtime execution and efficient lock-free data exchange between tasks. The Orocos site maintains an extensive list of Free Software/Open Source projects, related to Orocos under the headings Robotics, Real-time control and data acquisition, Motion control and planning, Computation, Physics, Bayes, Communication — Distribution, Graphs\— FSM — Component diagrams, Geometry — Visualization, and Miscellaneous.

Open Automaton Project

Teem is an evolutionary robotic framework including genetic algorithms, neural networks and robot simulators and interfaces. This framework aims at providing unlimited flexibility for experiement while retaining a clean code and architecture.

Evolutionary Robotics Open Soft and Hardware Framework aims at developing and sharing compatible solutions for evolving autonomous robots. Included are goevo, kevopic, and kevobot.

The Evorobot package allows you to replicate most experiments described in the book Evolutionary Robotics (Nolfi & Floreano, MIT Press, 2000) and run many new experiments. You can evolve robot controllers in simulations or, if you have a Khepera robot, evolve them on the physical robot attached to your computer.

The V4R Vision for Robotics robust object tracking system software requires Linux (tested under Suse Linux 8.2) and is available for download along with eight demo sessions:

• V4R Version 2.0
  (size: 339 kB, date: 22.6.2004)
• V4R manual
  (size: 103 kB, date: 22.6.2004 \u2013 draft)

Here is a Linux Kernel Device driver that is not part of the official distribution.

PlaniSim simulates a 2D-world in which objects are represented by points which have mass and struts which have length. Download a free copy from http://robofesta.open.ac.uk/Planisim.