Probotics, Inc. has announced that they have released the source code of “Map-N-Zap”, the control software for their Cye personal robot, under GPL. Parag Batavia, Probotics Chief Scientist, says “Right now, Map-N-Zap is a Win9x product only, but we have released all the source code under GPL, in the hopes that people using other platforms (linux especially) can do cool things with it.” What does it do?… “It controls our Cye personal robot,” continues Batavia. “This is a small robot that we sell that is capable of hauling things, vacuuming, and being used as a research platform.”

Batavia adds that, although Map-N-Zap itself is not currently implemented under Linux (but hopefully will be soon, thanks to its GPL release!), “Brian Chemel at CMU has developed Java code, which runs under Linux and Windows, to control Cye, and it is available at www.teambots.org. This makes the Cye robot immediately useful to Linux users.”

Here's the announcement from the Probotics web site . . .

The Probotics team is proud to announce that we are releasing all of our source code to Map-N-Zap under the Gnu Public License. This includes all of our GUI, Iconic programming language, and Robot communication protocol code. This decision was made in part because of the numerous requests from the linux community for our source code, and the realization that they, and developers for other platforms, have much to offer to our mission, which is to make really cool robotic technology. We would love for you to take our source code and do wonderful things with it. Obviously, since we are releasing under the GPL, any contributions you make will remain under the GPL as will this release . . .

This is a preliminary release of the source code. We are currently re-designing Map-N-Zap, to improve both the functionality and portability of the code. This code will also be much better documented than our current code. We expect to have this done in around 6 months or so. Until then, we wanted developers to have the opportunity to examine and work with our code.

The only caveat is that our software development team is essentially one person who wrote more than 95% of map-n-zap, and a few others who have contributed to it. As such, we cannot offer any support to developers. We just don't have the resources. What we are doing is creating a mailing list which will be used for announcements of any new developments or generally important things. Also, a Developer's Forum b-board will soon exist, which will be for you to talk to each other about any issues that arise, although we will monitor it and participate in it as time permits.

The source code is only known to compile under Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0, and makes use of MFC and DirectX. Therefore, it will not directly compile on non MS platforms. However, the dependance on DirectX is not great. A Readme file is included which gives compiliation instructions. Other than that, the code is commented, but there is no global source documentation.

 
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