Cogchar Project Status and Current Dev Tasks

[stub22]

There is a lot of not-recently-tested code in the Cogchar SVN repo
(more explanation of this code to come later), but there are a few
features that are runnable now:

   1) Build all components using Maven, after you have run the
magic JMonkey library-install ant script (you only have
to run it once).

   2) Run many of the JMonkey OpenGL demos inside the Felix
OSGi container, assuming your LWJGL native libs are *in the
right place*.  Or run outside  the container using project:  
org.cogchar.demo.render.opengl.

   3) A) Run a demo (inside or outside Felix) showing an OpenGL
canvas embedded in a swing canvas, with some primitive
manipulation of a model we exported from Maya into Ogre-XML format.

      B) Concurrent with this demo, you can play a bit with a semantic
metadata repo containing RDF + OWL, which is stored in an H2
SQL database the first time you access these features.  This
same portion of the demo may also be run standalone from the
Appdapter project (which is fully available in the Maven-Central
repo, whereas Cogchar is not, yet).

      C) In this same demo (by right-clicking in OpenGL display), it
is also possible to use the Cogchar-Robokind binding to trigger some
animation features of the Robokind core.  Robokind delivers robot
servo motion frames to Cogchar, which Cogchar dutifully prints to
the console.

      D) If you are running under Felix, you can also interact with
the Felix/Gogo OSGi shell at the console.    Try typing "lb" (and then,
ahem, press the <RETURN> or <ENTER> key)  in the console
window, to see the list of bundles loaded by your Felix instance.

   To run this full demo under OSGi:
i)    Install JMonkey libs
ii)   Maven build     org.cogchar.modules.all
iii)  Go to org.cogchar.modules.all directory
iv)   buildAndPartlyRun.sh  (builds runtime.properties for felix)
v)    run.sh

Current work goals:

   4)  Drive the motion of the Ogre/JMonkey humanoid characters
"Sinbad" and/or "Oto", using the Robokind servo motion frames
mentioned in #3.C above.

   5)  Create a simple wireframe head with movable eyes, for use in
debugging character's head+eye motions (or, get to know Sinbad's head,
and see if it can be useful to us).  Ideally also have some basic jaw motion,
for talking.

   6)  Connect to the Robokind vision features to receive visual
information from a moving physical humanoid robot eye-camera.

   7)  Display an onscreen visual map of what the character has seen
recently. We have some existing Swing code for this called "Egosphere",
which we plan to adapt/enhance with OpenGL.

   8)  Connect Cogchar "gaze" control features to Robokind to influence
where the physical robot looks.  Also connect this gaze to the simple
OpenGL head from #5 above.  Blend in more old/new GUI features with
#7 to facilitate debugging and make it all more fun.

   9)  Work with JMonkey team to get current versions of their libraries
published into Maven-Central.  Also work towards further OSGi
compatibility for JMonkey.    See this lengthy discussion thread:

http://jmonkeyengine.org/groups/development-discussion-jme3/forum/topic/maven-hosting

   10) Work with Robokind team to get robokind.org core modules
published into Maven central repo.

   11) Deliver Cogchar modules to Maven Central repo.