What's all this then?

[JoeStrout]

I'm a complete newbie to these forums, and while I can tell there's a lot of activity and excitement going on, I have to say that it's often very hard to tell what it's all about.

Take this forum, for example... the description says it's about an "Open Source TRS Project", and many of the posts refer to something called "TROM". But I can't find any introductory post or thread. In one post Matt pointed to http://www.trossenrobotics.com/tutorials/pcbasedrobotics.aspx, which discusses PC-based robotics, but makes no mention of TRS or TROM. Probably if I read every post in the forum, I'd eventually stumble across an introduction, but geez — there's a lot of them!

Does this forum (phpBB?) support sticky posts? If so, it'd be great to put a sticky post in each forum with an introduction for new people just coming along and wondering what it's all about. Otherwise, you risk becoming an insider's club speaking in tongues, with new users driven away in confusion.

Best,
- Joe

[Matt]

Hi Joe,

It's a fair criticism. There needs to be some cleaning up done. But what you have stumbled upon is more or less a series of discussions between different people, proposals, ideas, debates, etc. If the TRS concept finally becomes a full blown open source project we will create a full site with intros and all those goodies like you mention. For now, there is a bit of an old intro here:
http://www.trossenrobotics.com/tutorials/TRS1.aspx

which is linked off this page that has more "stuff" about it all, lol.
http://www.trossenrobotics.com/tutorials/trossenroboticssystem.aspx

Welcome to the forums!

[JoeStrout]

Thanks Matt, that's very helpful. Sounds like a very interesting project!

Best,
- Joe

[MikeG]

I read through the many forum posts and the links above.



TROM is strikingly similar to MSRS?

[Adrenalynn]

TROM is fundamentally/entirely different from MSRS.

TROM is a general-purpose interface between sensors/controllers and, effectively, a database of robot states. It's general-purpose in that it's designed to support any robot without the limitations of the other products out there. Further, it's cross-platform. It's also infinitely easier to implement than MSRS.

As I mentioned in another thread - finishing the second draft of the documentation is this weekend's project.

[MikeG]

I’m sorry Adrenalynn, I just don’t get it. Where can I find TROM? Can I download TROM?

[Adrenalynn]

Not today, no. It's still in initial development. It will end-up being community supported before it's all said and done.

I have one of the few copies because I'm working on the whitepaper. You'll be able to read the whitepaper soonish, though.

[droidcommander]

I’m sorry Adrenalynn, I just don’t get it. Where can I find TROM? Can I download TROM?

Welcome to the club Mike, around here we've all be chomping at the bit to get hold of the TROM and start banging out PC based Robots with it, it's an awesome idea and IMHO a vast improvement over the alternative (Home-grown proprietary platform, or MSRS)

DroidCommander

[Adrenalynn]

The whitepaper has been through a first draft, and the second draft is just about to get mailed off to Matt in a few minutes. The TROM itself is a long way from "start banging out PC based Robots with it" in my humble opinion. It's going to require community involvement at the lowest levels to make it really useful for everyone to "start banging out PC based Robots with it". ;)

[droidcommander]

So Adrenalynn, I don't mean to be a pain and all. But I guess I'm going to anyhow.

So are we talking months or year(s) here that the community is going to be able to participate in this project and start to help in the movement forward. I've been watching the TRS Project forum and have noticed little since july

I know you guys are INCREDIBLY busy, I just am excited to help.

DroidCommander

[Tyberius]

Yeah Adrenalynn what's the hold up? :D

[Adrenalynn]

If you're willing and able to get your hands dirty with programming in the guts of the community project, I'd guess "very soon". If you're looking for a turn-key product, that's still months out, imho.

[agavejoe]

Do you have a plan in place to handle several developers working on this project? It looks like you settled on XML web services? So this is a distributed app? Have you settled on items like schemas and transforms? Are the developers writing to a common class interface?

[agavejoe]

Is the whitepaper published somewhere?

[Adrenalynn]

Not yet. It's still in its final editing with the initial authors.

[Sienna]

Any updates?

[droidcommander]

*shrug* any updates???

[Matt]

We are looking at submitting a grant to NSF and have a new developer that may start working on the visualizer for the project so some life is back into the project. The online updates will probably go silent for quite sometime however. With as many stops and starts as the project has had over the years I don't want to keep teasing people. Probably better to just announce when real progress has been made and it's closer to a reality.