We are evaluating using Orocos for a couple of different robotics projects, and I was hoping to get some feedback from some of the more experienced users. Specific questions we have are

• Has anyone ported RTT+KDL+OCL to the Mac (we currently don't need BFL)? We need to run the system on both Mac and Linux. I noticed a post that someone had KDL compiling on a Mac, but we'd need RTT and OCL also. Mostly this looks like porting RTT to a new O/S, which it's been setup nicely to do.
• Has anyone used Orocos in a truly safety-critical system? If so, any impressions you could share?
• Does anyone have any long-term experience with the reliability of Tao/Corba for the distributed aspects of Orocos?
• Does anyone have any measurements of the latency and jitter on periodic/aperiodic commands and data, sent between processes using Corba?
• One of the thorny design issues we foresee is the ability to switch between multiple controllers, and see at least a couple of different ways to do this with Orocos' components. Any suggestions on these 3 possible approaches below (or any other approaches you can think of)?
  1. Model the controllers as one component, and internally switch between the controllers. This muddies the component interfacei as it now needs to be the union of all possible data/parameters used by all internal controllers (e.g. some of our cartesian controllers use no force-torque data, or data from 1 sensor, or even data from 2 sensors)
  2. Model the controllers as individual components, and "turn on" only the currently active controller. We're a little worried about any possible lag in switching time here, though doubt that it would really be an issue
  3. Model the controllers in a hierarchical fashion, though we're not sure if this is even possible in Orocos (or in general)?

Any other general feedback definitely appreciated. Overall Orocos looks like a great tool, and we'd love to use it. We just need to make sure it will truly fit our needs.

Thanks
Stephen