RobotFlow is a toolkit for mobile robotics that is built on the FlowDesigner project.
The visual programming interface in the FlowDesigner project is a powerful feature that allows users to better visualize and understand what is happening in their robot's control loops, sensors, and actuators by using graphical probes and debugging in real-time.
Work on RobotFlow began in September of 2001 as a project at the Mobile Robotics and Intelligent Systems Laboratory (LABORIUS) at the University of Sherbrooke. The project is still ongoing and will become available to everyone through SourceForge as an LGPL project.
This toolkit hopes to provide a standard and open platform for anyone from hobbyists to researchers to use and improve upon over time. It primarily supports Linux/Unix using the GNOME GUI.
The FlowDesigner and the RobotFlow toolkit are both written in C++ and offer a wide range of fully customizable control and processing blocks. These include drivers and interfaces for Pioneer2 Robots, vision processing algorithms, player/stage simulator drivers, signal processing algorithms, basic behaviors, fuzzy logic control, artificial neural networks, embedded super blocks, basic networking, device control, and finite state machines (beta).
The networks created with the visual interface in RobotFlow called "flowdesigner" can also be run as scripts (with no graphical interface), allowing robots with lower resources to take full advantage of the software. FlowDesigner provides an easy way to create custom data types, structures, and blocks as toolkits.
New features in this release include working with FlowDesigner 0.9 and MARIE 0.4, the creation of a RobotFlow namespace, OpenCV 0.9.6 library support with image tracking (text, color, features) and face tracking algorithms, new included behaviors, updated configure scripts, and a fixed SNCRZ30 RS-232 driver.
Version 0.2.6: N/A