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From: "Joaquin Sitte" j.sitte@qut.edu.au Date: 9 novembre 2005 02:33:25 GMT+01:00 To: squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org Subject: RE: Robotics questions Reply-To: The general-purpose Squeak developers list <squeak- dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org>
Hi Paul,
- Stephane's book, has nothing to do with real robots. It is a gentle
introduction, and a very nice one, to programming in Smalltalk aimed at beginners (kids) that uses the robot metaphor to visualise the execution of programs. It is very much in the spirit of learning programming with turtle graphics.
I too am trying to use Squeak for real robotics and I have also bought and Stephane's book (although for other reasons). There is nothing in the book that is immediately useful for real robotics, it was not meant to be and the purpose if different.
- and 3.
I am using Squeak in my lectures on Computational Intelligence for Embedded Systems for third and fourth year university students in Engineering and Information Technology. Students are given a simulator for mobile robots (the Khepera robots to be precise) running in Squeak where they can develop robot behaviours (including autonomous robot soccer players). The simulator also supports controlling Khepera robots from a PC via a wireless (Bluetooth) link. The same (Smalltalk) behaviour code can be used identically to control the simulated Khepera robot and the real robot.
In another ongoing project we are adapting the Squeak VM to run on a bare XScale processor without underlying operating system.
I am not aware of other current work on Smalltalk for Robotics, although there probably are a few things being done. I remember some time ago seeing someone mentioning on this list a robotic underwater vehicle controlled by Smalltalk. Also Squeak has been ported to the Gumstix SBC. The Gumstix SBC has been recently used in robotics projects (but not using Squeak, as far as I am aware).
Cheers
Joaquin
Dr. Joaquin Sitte, Associate Professor. School of Software Engineering and Data Communication Faculty of Information Technology Queensland University of Technology GPO Box 2434, Brisbane, Q 4001 Australia Phone +61 7 3864 9325 Fax +61 7 3864 9390 e-mail: j.sitte@qut.edu.au homepage http://www.fit.qut.edu.au/~sitte
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