BICA, a building block for robotic applications

ROS Projects
1

Hi,

We have just released BICA, a powerful framework based on ROS to develop robotic behaviors. It comes with a visual editor of finite state machines.

We use it both in our industrial projects and in the software we use, together with ROSPlan, in the RoboCup SSPL with the Pepper robot.

I hope someone finds it useful. Contributions are welcome.

Francisco.

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2

Wow, I see a relatively large number of projects dealing with Behavior Design recently…

Just to name few:

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Dear Davide,

I agree. After all, developing behaviors for robots is the Holy Grail of mobile robotics. The development of robotic behavior is still a very active field of research, although it is a problem in which many people have been working for more than 40 years: reactive, hybrid, three-level architectures, sumbsuption, … All of them try to solve the same problem: generate apparently intelligent behaviors.

ROS provides a great environment to develop software for robots, but it does not implement the generation of behaviors for complex tasks. Until recently, Smach and ROSPlan were the only outstanding projects to address this problem.

I think it is positive that many of the approaches that have been developed over these years are released to the community as ROS packages. It is a way for these software not to die with the project that saw them born. As they say in the YARP paper, sometimes projects are black holes of code, of which only papers survive.

Best
Francisco

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I think it is positive that many of the approaches that have been developed over these years are released to the community as ROS packages.

I 100% agree :slight_smile:

As they say in the YARP paper, sometimes projects are black holes of code, of which only papers survive.

Not so sure I agree on this one :stuck_out_tongue:

Thank you for sharing your work, I am sure a lot of people will find it useful.

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I want to add my own work (a bit of self advertising it is not bad :slight_smile: )
LRP

Besides, more than visual editor, we add live programming to develop robotic behaviors.
I just hope to add a bit more of data about this topic

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@mcamp very cool. You should definitively do some self advertising, what all these projects miss, IMO, is some momentum :slight_smile: