Acknowledgments

The Origin of Tekkotsu

Tekkotsu is an open source platform developed primarily at Carnegie Mellon University with contributions from other individuals and groups around the world. With funding from the Sony Corporation, we sought to develop animal learning models on the AIBO, but we had no experience with AIBO programming. So to get us started, Professor Manuela Veloso kindly shared her robot soccer program, CMPack'02, with us. Her graduate student, Scott Lenser, provided much handholding and support in the early days.

The result of our work on modeling animal learning was a realization that we needed more infrastructure for general-purpose application development on the AIBO. Hence, Tekkotsu was born.

Tekkotsu's early innovations included a centralized event router architecture, the ability to share C++ objects and methods across processes (despite Aperios' lack of a fork system call), a pipelined vision architecture with on-demand evaluation, a state machine formalism that is integrated with and makes full use of the Tekkotsu event mechanism, and a number of GUI tools for better control and feedback.  Recently, we have added fully featured kinematics to support continuing research into manipulation strategies, and have a number of other projects in development.

We continue to rely on two important modules from CMPack: the CMVision library for low-level vision and color image segmentation, and the WalkMC routines for locomotion. These modules fall under the CMPack'02 license, basically the GNU GPL, with some exceptions for Sony.  The rest of Tekkotsu is released under the standard GNU LGPL.

We would like to thank the following contributors:

Bundled Libraries