Robot Operating System from Willow Garage

A project I'm working on (more details later) will likely be using Robot Operating System (ROS) by Willow Garage. This is essentially a (primarily) Unix-based operating system that has been created to provide a common, open source environment for the development of robotic applications. Willow Garage is closely tied to OpenCV development, and ROS should make it simple for integrating the most bleeding edge OpenCV functions along with digital camera drivers necessary for my project. I have set up an Ubuntu virtual machine using Sun's VirtualBox to familiarize myself with ROS. The documentation available at these websites is superb, so I will not go into more detail about setting this up. In the near future I will set up a dedicated PC. For now, I am going through the many tutorials available on the ROS website.

[UPDATE]
I have a dedicated PC set up running Ubuntu. To install OpenCV (after downloading appropriate tarballs file):

   1. tar -xjf OpenCV-2.1.0.tar.bz2
   2. mkdir opencv.build
   3. cd opencv.build
   4. cmake [] ../OpenCV-2.1.0 # CMake-way
   5. make -j 2
   6. sudo make install
   7. sudo ldconfig # linux only

Short-term goal is to create a basic image publisher/subscriber in ROS using OpenCV IplImages.