robots.net - MARIE: Rapid Prototyping for Robotics

Carle Côté emailed to tell us about the first public release of MARIE: We are proud to announce the first public release of MARIE, Version 0.1 (Tinker). The Mobile and Autonomous Robotics Integration Environment (MARIE) is a robotic development and integration environment focused on existing softwares reusability and exploitation of already available APIs and middlewares frequently used in robotics. The main purpose of MARIE is to create a rapid-prototyping approach to software development in robotics.

- What is MARIE?

MARIE is a new design tool for mobile and autonomous robot application, designed to facilitate the integration of multiple heterogeneous software elements. It is a flexible tool based on a distributed model, thus allowing the realization of an application using one machine or various networked machines, architectures and platforms.

- How do we do this?

By creating several modules which have a specific role in the overall application. The first part consists of application adapters which handle all the details of a specific external application, including the starting and stopping of the application and the data conversion. The application adapters communicate together using a common data language based on XML (see Data types documentation). These communications are handled by the communication adapters which can handle several communication paradigms. All these modules are supervised by the application manager which delegates the communication part to one or several communication managers.

MARIE Version 0.1 contains Application Adapters for Player/Stage/Gazebo (http://playerstage.sf.net, from USC), CARMEN (http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~carmen/, from CMU) and RobotFlow/FlowDesigner (http://flowdesigner.sf.net, from UdeS). Also, it supports splitter and mailbox communication adapters.

The MARIE Team
Yannick Brosseau
Carle Côté
Dominic Létourneau
Francois Michaud
http://marie.sourceforge.net/
http://www.gel.usherbrooke.ca/laborius/