[Pyro-users] Pyro-Tekkotsu relationship ?

[Douglas S. Blank]

George,

Pyro only uses a small part of Tekkotsu, basically their debugger. 
Tekkotsu is a very interesting system for programming the Aibo through 
events. But we don't use that.

Pyro just uses the Tekkotsu Monitor. The Montior is a series of servers 
that run on the Aibo such that any program can connect onto them and 
read sensor data, images, and control movements. We have made a Python 
interface to connect onto the servers running on the Aibo, and put a 
Pyro interface on that. The Pyro code will still run on a PC and 
connects to the dogs via wireless.

The main project of Tekkotsu offers a unique programming environment. If 
I were going to land an Aibo on the moon, I'd probably use Tekkotsu to 
control it. But for doing interactive teaching, and high-level scripting 
and experiments in the lab, I'd use Pyro.

To give you an idea of the environments: In Tekkotsu, if you want to 
change a line of code, you must recompile everything that depends on the 
code (it is C++ code) using the provided cross-compiler. Then the code 
is copied to the dog over ftp, the dog shuts down, and starts back up. 
The whole process (compile + transfer + reboot) lasts at least a minute 
on our machines. In Pyro, you simply press the "reload brain" button and 
nearly instantly you are running the new code.

Others on this list might have other suggestions on environments for the 
Aibo.

For those of you ready to start running Pyro with Aibo, I'll try to get 
our patches to the Tekkotsu group this week.

-Doug

George Sakkis wrote:
> I'm going to work on a Sony Aibo and I've started reading the documentation of both Tekkotsu
> (http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~tekkotsu/) and Pyro, but I'm not sure yet how do they relate to one
> another. Although Tekkotsu is a huge improvement compared to the messy underlying Open-R API, my
> first impression based on the "SampleBehavior" and "SampleMC" tutorial examples are that it is still
> cumbersome for high-level robot programming (I guess working almost exclusively on python for the
> last year or so makes everything else seem ugly ;-). I would be very happy if I could avoid digging
> into Tekkotsu altogether and focus on Pyro only, so I was wondering: is Pyro just a python wrapper
> of Tekkotsu (or a subset of it) ? Or they are complementary ? Or they address different needs/levels
> of abstraction ? Thanks in advance for any insight.
> 
> George
> 
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-- 
Douglas S. Blank,         Assistant Professor
dblank at brynmawr.edu,            (610)526-6501
Bryn Mawr College,   Computer Science Program
101 North Merion Ave,       Park Science Bld.
Bryn Mawr, PA 19010  dangermouse.brynmawr.edu