Fawkes released!

It's finally done, after almost three years of development we have released our Fawkes Robot Software Framework as Open Source Software! You can read more about and download it at http://www.fawkesrobotics.org. It's a component-based software framework to operate robots in uncertain environments. It is designed to work on multiple robot platforms in different domains (currently robot soccer and service robotics). Currently we employ the robot software frameworks on three different kinds of robots in two teams (see for instance the AllemaniACs team description on the Fawkes website).

Currently Fawkes works on Linux and FreeBSD. If you want to run it on Linux I recommend using Fedora, as it provides all the required software packages out of the box. You can find a yum command to get 'em all on the FawkesOnFedora wiki page. The next milestone will be to add support for system-wide installation. That will allow us to provide package repositories for even simpler installation. Currently Fawkes is build and used in a self-contained tree, which is a very flexible and easy setup to start developing for the robot without special privileges (cf. DeveloperGettingStartedGuide)

At that point we can then use the software to build an easy to use simulation environment for example for the planned Fedora Robotics LiveCD, integrating Fawkes with the Player/Stage/Gazebo simulation environment and providing the Fawkes Lua scripting facility to make the robot operate in the simulation! It's still a way, but today we made a huge step towards this goal. Now is also the time to revive the Fedora Robotics SIG, which hasn't been active for the last couple of months due to people being busy with other stuff.