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This is a library for framework independent remote control of semi-autonomous robots.

This library was initiated and is currently developed at the Robotics Innovation Center of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Bremen.

Robots or semi-autonomous vehicles often use their own Framework, with it's own proprietary communication. While these are often well suited for in-system communication, they often cause trouble when those systems should be controlled by an external connection.

Those connections may also have additional requirements, like low bandwidth, high latency, etc., or custom communication hardware, which does not have an ethernet stack. This library defines an interface to those robots and supports externally programmed Transports that can handle the requirements above.

An evaluation of the library has beed published at the i-SAIRAS conference in 2020, you can find the Paper here.

If you want to cite this library you can use this bibtex entry:

@inproceedings{danter2020rrc,
    title = {Lightweight and Framework-Independent Communication Library to Support Cross-Plattform Robotic Applications and High-Latency Connections},
    booktitle = {International Symposium on Systems, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Automation in Space (i-SAIRAS), 15th, October 19-23, Online-Conference},
    author = {Leon Cedric Danter and Steffen Planthaber and Alexander Dettmann and Wiebke Brinkmann and Frank Kirchner},
    year = {2020},
    url = {https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/isairas2020fullpapers/pdf/5063.pdf}
}

BSD Clause 3
- Copyright DFKI GmbH

The library is using the high-level networking library ZeroMQ (ZMQ) and Google's language- and platform-neutral proto3 for de-/serialization. Therefor you need to manually install the following OS dependencies: protobuf and zeromq

sudo apt install libprotobuf-dev protobuf-compiler libzmq3-dev libreadline-dev

The library is compiled using cmake. To compile it manually execute the following lines from the repositories root directory:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make

Optionally you can add the flags -DBUILD_EXAMPLES=ON and -DBUILD_TESTS=ON to build the examples and test directory respectively.

In order to install protobuf3 from source you need additional dependencies:

apt-get install autoconf automake libtool curl make g++ unzip lsb-release

You can use the compile_protobuf_from_source.bash script to build protobuf from source. Optionally you can path the install destination as follows:

build_protobuf "$INSTALL_PATH"

This will install protobuf 3 in the specified INSTALL_PATH (default is /usr/local)

In case you have a system protobuf installed, defien the protobuf locations by yourself:

cmake .. -DBUILD_EXAMPLES=true -DPROTOBUF_PROTOC_EXECUTABLE=/bin/protoc -DPROTOBUF_IMPORT_DIRS=/include -DPROTOBUF_INCLUDE_DIR=/include -DPROTOBUF_LIBRARY=/lib/libprotobuf.so.28

This directory structure follows some simple rules, to allow for generic build processes and simplify reuse of this project.

Please have a look into the provided Main examples

• examples/ControlledRobotMain.cpp (Robot that takes the position command and sets its position to it)
• examples/RobotControllerMain.cpp (controller that sets the desired robot position)

You can build the Doxygen documentation using $> doxygen Doxyfile, it will be written to the build/doc folder.

There are two main libraries generated when compiling this repository:

The RobotController class is a framework independent cpp class which is able to control any Robot/Vehicle that has a ControlledRobot library wrapped into its control framework.

This library is to be used on the robot, you can map the commands received from the RobotController Library to commands of your Robot to listen to the commands. Also you can add Telemery to this library, which are then send to the RobotController.

Transports are seperated into two directions: commands and telemetry. While commands from RobotController to ControlledRobot are getting acknowledged on retrieval, the retrieval of telemetry is not confirmed.

These Transports are given to the RobotController and ControlledRobot in their contructor and only implement an send() and receive() function. So it is easy to implement other means of connections between those by implementing the Transport.hpp interface.

The repository includes a test directory with several boost test cases. You can build this directory and the test_suite executable as follows:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake -D -DBUILD_TESTS=ON ..
make

If you always want to build the test directory as well add the following line to your CMakeLists.txt

set(BUILD_TESTS ON)

In order to run the tests you can either run all by executing (in /build/test) ./test_suite or choose a specific test with the -t flag ./test_suite -t checking_current_pose

To search for bugs or report them, please use GitHubs Issue-Tracker