Future of rosaria and Aria
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Reed Hedges
Apr 17, 2018, 11:19:03 AM4/17/18
to ros-sig-pioneer
Hello,
As many of you know, MobileRobots LLC is now shut down and Omron/Adept is no longer maintaining or supporting ARIA, or manufacturing research robots (Pioneer etc.).
I no longer work for Omron/Adept.
ARIA and other software and documentation is still available from http://robots.mobilerobots.com, but I don't know how long Omron/Adept plans to keep that website online.
If rosaria users, or ARIA users in general, are interested in creating a fork of ARIA that can continue to be used with rosaria, and developed or updated itself, I may be able to help a little bit. This would also be an opportunity to make changes to ARIA that were previously not possible in the official/upstream ARIA due to constraints from internal use by ARIA at Adept or other compatibility requirements. I would also suggest a minor change to the name.
The first step would probably be to get the last GPL release of ARIA source and put it on github, and perhaps start with some simplifications and updates (I've been looking at this already.)
The alternatives to users of Pioneer robots and ROS is to switch to the "p2os" ROS driver, or to just drop a copy of ARIA source code into rosaria in a "frozen" state and continue using it as-is with no future changes for as long as possible.
I can also continue to try to answer questions and provide information about ARIA and Pioneer robots here or elsewhere, though I no longer have the same amount of time or resources for in depth testing or debugging.
What would you like to do?
Reed
As many of you know, MobileRobots LLC is now shut down and Omron/Adept is no longer maintaining or supporting ARIA, or manufacturing research robots (Pioneer etc.).
I no longer work for Omron/Adept.
ARIA and other software and documentation is still available from http://robots.mobilerobots.com, but I don't know how long Omron/Adept plans to keep that website online.
If rosaria users, or ARIA users in general, are interested in creating a fork of ARIA that can continue to be used with rosaria, and developed or updated itself, I may be able to help a little bit. This would also be an opportunity to make changes to ARIA that were previously not possible in the official/upstream ARIA due to constraints from internal use by ARIA at Adept or other compatibility requirements. I would also suggest a minor change to the name.
The first step would probably be to get the last GPL release of ARIA source and put it on github, and perhaps start with some simplifications and updates (I've been looking at this already.)
The alternatives to users of Pioneer robots and ROS is to switch to the "p2os" ROS driver, or to just drop a copy of ARIA source code into rosaria in a "frozen" state and continue using it as-is with no future changes for as long as possible.
I can also continue to try to answer questions and provide information about ARIA and Pioneer robots here or elsewhere, though I no longer have the same amount of time or resources for in depth testing or debugging.
What would you like to do?
Reed
G.A. vd. Hoorn - 3ME
Apr 17, 2018, 11:23:45 AM4/17/18
to ros-sig-pioneer
thanks for reaching out.
I'm not a Pioneer / ARIA user myself, but I do believe it's important
that we take steps to make sure this software is 'saved' and provide
some continuity for current and future users.
Seeing as this is an important topic, and this sig has a limited reach,
would it perhaps be an idea to (re)post this on ROS Discourse [1]?
Gijs
[1] http://discourse.ros.org
Amine Bendahmane
Apr 18, 2018, 4:26:16 AM4/18/18
to ros-sig-pioneer
Hi Reed,
Indeed the best for now is to create a github repository for the last ARIA source, then we open a conversation to discuss possible code changes with the open source community
Amine
Message has been deleted
Reed Hedges
Jul 23, 2018, 10:59:37 AM7/23/18
to ros-sig-pioneer
If it is useful to anyone, I've uploaded a (somewhat modified) copy of
the last GPL ARIA release to <https://github.com/reedhedges/AriaCoda>.
We can use github tools such as bug report tracker to manage any
changes or fixes still needed. I removed a bunch of code from this
version of ARIA that may make any future maintainence slightly easier.
Some of these were obsolete or deprecated classes/features, some were
very rarely used features, and some is not relevant for public use of
ARIA with Pioneer research robots.
ArNetworking is not included here. If anyone out there is actually
using it we can do something with the last release of that as well.
(If anyone is using ros-arnl, they will need ArNetworking, but would
also need a copy of ARNL purchased from mobilerobots anyway which
includes copies of ARIA and ArNetworking.)
If someone wants to update the rosaria ARIA-dependency rules and
scripts to use this source code instead of the (now inaccessible)
libaria debian package from mobilerobots, please do so and submit a
pull request to rosaria.
Reed
On Tue, Jun 5, 2018 at 12:28 PM, SomeT <jamie....@gmail.com> wrote:
> I am currently consistently utilising the Aria library in c++. Been looking
> for people for a while to discuss this and learn it better but in a more
> consistenly active manner.
>
> Does anyone use Discord or frequent IRC servers such as freenode at all? I
> was thinking of setting up some sort of community on either of these...?
> --
> http://www.ros.org/wiki/sig/robots/Pioneer
the last GPL ARIA release to <https://github.com/reedhedges/AriaCoda>.
We can use github tools such as bug report tracker to manage any
changes or fixes still needed. I removed a bunch of code from this
version of ARIA that may make any future maintainence slightly easier.
Some of these were obsolete or deprecated classes/features, some were
very rarely used features, and some is not relevant for public use of
ARIA with Pioneer research robots.
ArNetworking is not included here. If anyone out there is actually
using it we can do something with the last release of that as well.
(If anyone is using ros-arnl, they will need ArNetworking, but would
also need a copy of ARNL purchased from mobilerobots anyway which
includes copies of ARIA and ArNetworking.)
If someone wants to update the rosaria ARIA-dependency rules and
scripts to use this source code instead of the (now inaccessible)
libaria debian package from mobilerobots, please do so and submit a
pull request to rosaria.
Reed
On Tue, Jun 5, 2018 at 12:28 PM, SomeT <jamie....@gmail.com> wrote:
> I am currently consistently utilising the Aria library in c++. Been looking
> for people for a while to discuss this and learn it better but in a more
> consistenly active manner.
>
> Does anyone use Discord or frequent IRC servers such as freenode at all? I
> was thinking of setting up some sort of community on either of these...?
> http://www.ros.org/wiki/sig/robots/Pioneer
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