Orca History

Note:

Reviewed for release 2.7.0.

Orca began as part of the EU-funded OROCOS Project: a project to develop an Open-Source Robotic Control System. The project was a collaboration between four universities: KTH (Sweden), Leuven (Belgium), LAAS (France) and Ulm (Germany). The four institution worked on separate parts of a project that was intended to eventually merge, but never did. The Orocos name now refers to the Belgian part.

The task of KTH was to build a set of communication patterns to enable the interaction of distributed components. This work, spearheaded by Anders Orebäck, was called Orocos@KTH. By June 2004 Orocos@KTH had also been adopted by members of the Australian Centre for Field Robotics. By this time it had diverged far enough from the work at Leuven that a new name was required to disambiguate the two, and Orca1 was born. At that time the project moved to SourceForge.

Work on porting Orca to Ice started in March of 2005. The code base was forked in late 2005, the main difference being the move to Ice middleware as the sole communications package. Switching to Ice has caused large changes in the component model.

At present, Orca is most actively used at several Universities in Sydney, Australia. For a sample of past and current projects see Projects.