Rossum Gets a Christmas Present

One of my favorite robotics web sites is the "Cool Robot
of the Week" feature provided by NASA's Space Telerobotics
Program. Each week they identify a robotics project
as being noteworthy, innovative, and well... cool.
This week, the Cool Robot site they've chosen is none other
than The Rossum Project.

There are a lot of very impressive sites named on the
Cool Robot page, and I consider it an honor for Rossum to
be named as one of them. If you've never visited their
page, you're missing a real treat. Their URL is

http://ranier.hq.nasa.gov/telerobotics_page/coolrobots.html

Getting on the Cool Robot page has been an ambition of mine for
quite a while. In retrospect, I'm almost grateful that they didn't
pick us up sooner, because they would have missed some of the
wonderful stuff we've added to the Rossum site in the last
few months. First, there was Michael Gauland's MotionApplet,
a Java applet that demonstrates the kinematics of a differential
steering system. Most recently, Vassilis Varveropoulos provided
web pages and software describing his work with robot Localization.
He also supplied the Rossum site with some sorely needed photographs
of actual robots. Even I got into the act, with a tutorial on
modeling robot trajectories. You can find these items under
http://rossum.sourceforge.net/papers/

Other News

Incidentally, Vassilis has just posted a jar file providing a
RP1 client that simulates his robot and demonstrates some of
his working in using sensor information for robot Localization.

And, within the next few days, I will be posting the new
version of the RP1 robot simulator, Rev 0.49. Although
it does not introduce any new features, it does include bug
fixes and evolutionary improvements to the internal class
organization which are needed for the next phase of its
development.

Concluding

My heartfelt thanks to everyone who has contributed to the Rossum
Project for all the help and encouragement over the last
year. Without your support, I would have chucked this whole
thing long ago. I also want to thank our gracious (web) host,
Source Forge for providing us with the many resources we need
to keep the project going.

My best wishes to all of you in this holiday season and
for the next year.

gary