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CRI or Customizable Robot Interface is a frontend for ROS (www.ros.org) that can be used in much the same fashion as RViz except that it is specialized as a front-end, rather than functioning as a "visual debugger." Easily modified Python script is used to create the interface which interacts with a faster C++ renderer core. Scripts can also be attached to elements of the visualizer, including markers and data from topics. This scheme is intended to enable rapid application development for the purposes of presenting a client with a simplified interface.
At this time, only Ubuntu Linux is supported.
To install the package:
- Install OGRE (www.ogre3d.org) and OIS from Ubuntu's Software Center or from the site directly. Ensure that OIS's headers are installed otherwise Ogre Procedural's build process will complain about missing packages.
- Install the ROS Arm Navigation package from Ubuntu's Software Center
- Download and install Ogre Procedural from here. The packages are compressed using the .7z format. Use p7zip available from here to decompress.
- Clone the repository from github at the address git://github.com/jonclaassens/cri.git
- Run 'rosmake' in the root directory, and use 'rosrun cri cri' to start the program
- Right click anywhere on the window to open a menu
To execute the technology demonstration, simply 'rosrun cri technology_test' after cri has started.
The default 'flying' camera of CRI can be moved about with the w, a, s, d, keys. Hold the left mouse button to pan the camera and use the scroll wheel to move forward or retreat. Key e and c will roll the camera.
The author (jonclaassens -at- gmail.com) is affiliated with the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR, www.csir.co.za) in South Africa and Imperial College London and, in particular, the BioART lab of Dr. Yiannis Demiris (www.iis.ee.ic.ac.uk/yiannis/webcontent/HomePage.html).