GSoC’22 RoboComp project: Development on OSRF’s traffic editor

13th June 2022

Getting Started

As I was only familiar with the traffic-editor, I sought to further understand Robocomp as a framework. What better way to understand Robocomp than to actually try it!

Installation

From following the instructions on the README.md, the installation was quite smooth.

I will further document my Robocomp starting tutorials in the future…

Traffic Editor moving to Rust!

On a side note, it came to my attention that the good folks at Open Robotics have been shifting their development of traffic-editor to be Rust-based! This will completely change how I’ll contribute to this tool - instead of using C++/QT, I’ll need to learn Rust/Bevy, an exciting new language and game engine.

Based on my interactions with OSRC, the main motivations for moving to Rust/Bevy are to maximize the reusability of the work we’re doing, and the Entity-Component-System design of Bevy would allow users to develop the editor features as “systems”. These will be able to be mixed-and-matched and extended by downstream users to add more functionality than whatever current developers have in mind.

I’ll be testing it out and documenting the new features in my next update!

Samuel Ang