IRIS Runtime

What is IRIS Runtime?

Very briefly, this is the runtime environment within which all objects belonging to the classes of IRIS Foundation, IRIS-XT and IRIS-3D are created and destroyed. Currently, this also houses a (rather primitive) command line interpreter, currently a testbed for online issuing of commands to IRIS. This shall be soon replaced by a real (and useful) scripting language. I'm currently exploring three options: Pike, Python or Cint. The fourth option, should there be time constraints, is to use our own (primitive) batch language as a stopgap measure.

I intended IRIS Runtime to have analysis and processing capabilities proper of its own. The scope of these capabilities finally convinced me to keep IRIS Runtime as clean and separate from the other modules as possible, since this module is likely to have more machine-dependent code than any other.

Efforts are on to extend IRIS beyond its intended application, that it is capable of integrating sonar and electronic compass information into a unified world model.

More tantalising is the possibility of vision-based localisation, and rapid object recognition in 3D. There are a host of papers, but I'm still reading them :-) Either way, these are now officially part of Osiris.

It is useless to describe IRIS Runtime, as it is still in flux. Parts of it may be moved to existing (or even new) namespaces, or deleted. For now, watch this space!