Paris, France -- (SBWIRE) -- 09/21/2010 -- Gostai, the editor of innovative software for robotics & AI, decided to open Urbi’s code base to the community in May, 2010. To support this release, Gostai has decided to organize the first Urbi Open Source Contest, in which all robotic enthusiasts can participate to demonstrate their creativity and skills in programming robots or complex systems in general.

Urbi is an advanced open source robotics operating system, already available for a large number of robots like Aldebaran® Nao, Segway® RMP or Lego® Mindstorm, among 15 other different robots. One of its main innovations lies in a new orchestration script language called urbiscript, which natively integrates parallelism and event-based programming.

Next to Urbi, Gostai also offers the Gostai Studio graphical programming tools, and compatibility with various simulators, making the Urbi framework one of the most advanced and complete solution for robot and complex system programming available today.

Urbi is very simple to use even for beginners. This contest is the best opportunity for them to start their first robotics project and show their skills in programming.

Application process: Anyone can participate, as long as they use Urbi open source for their project. Any tool can be used, including the Webots simulator for people who do not have a physical robot. The application form is on the Urbiforge portal: http://www.urbiforge.org/index.php/Main/UrbiContest2010.

As soon as the application is complete, participants will receive a confirmation mail with a password to a personal wiki page where they will be able to publish everything that is related to their project: photos, videos, code lines, making of, etc. In effect, this wiki page is considered to be the project itself. Each participant must publish at least one video of the project and give their source code to the community with a GPL, BSD or equivalent license.

Gostai provides a Pro Gostai studio suite® license during the entire contest, as well as a Cyberbotics Webots® Pro license, Ogre, Bullet and Qt, all running Urbi.

Prizes:
1st place:
-A 400€ Robopolis purchase voucher
-A Gostai Studio Suite license, with a retail price of 2990€
-A Pro Webots license & Urbi for Webots, with a retail price of 2990€
-A 500€ discount on the purchase of a Developer Program edition Nao and special access to the Developer Program
-A great Gostai T-shirt to show off with your robotics friends!

2nd place:
-A Gostai Studio Suite license, with a retail price of 2990€
-An Edu Webots license & Urbi for Webots, with a retail price of 399€
-A great Gostai T-shirt to show off with your robotics friends!

3rd place:
-A Gostai Studio Suite license, with a retail value of 2990€
-A great Gostai T-shirt to show off with your robotics friends!

The five best projects will also benefit from a free subscription to Planète Robots magazine for a year.

Contest dates are September 15 to December 15. A jury made of Jean-Christophe Baillie (Gostai), Bruno Maisonnier (Aldebaran Robotics), Bruno Bonnell (Robopolis), Frédéric Boisdron (Planète Robots), Florent Souvestre (Planète Sciences) and David Filliat (ENSTA Paristech University) will determine the best projects based on the information made available on the Urbiforge project page.

Participants will be judged on the originality, the execution and the design of their project as well as the clarity and interest of the content they post on their project page. All the information about the contest is available on Urbiforge.

About Gostai and Urbi
Gostai is a Paris-based editor of innovative software for robotics & AI. Gostai’s flagship is Urbi, an open source, flexible, modular and innovative solution for robot operating control, which is compatible with Linux, Windows or real-time operating systems. Gostai also develops Gostai Studio, a suite of graphical programming tools for robotics and complex system, GostaiRTC, which extends Urbi with standard interfaces like RTC for the industry, and the GostaiNet cloud computing architecture for robotics.