The Open RObot COntrol Software (Orocos) Toolchain is a bundle of multiple packages, which need to be build and installed separately.

• Orocos Real-Time Toolkit (rtt) - a component framework that allows us to write real-time components in C++
• Orocos Log4cpp (log4cpp) - a patched version of the Log4cpp library for flexible logging to files, syslog, IDSA and other destinations
• Orocos Component Library (ocl) - the necessary components to start an application and interact with it at run-time

Futhermore the Orocos Toolchain comes with oroGen and some of its dependencies, a specification language and code generator for the Orocos Realtime Toolkit. Also check the installation instructions of the Rock - the Robot Construction Kit project for further details.

You might also want to have a look at the following sister projects, which are out of the scope of this manual:

• Orocos Kinematics Dynamics Library (KDL) - an application independent framework for modeling and computation of kinematic chains
• Orocos Bayesian Filtering Library (BFL) - an application independent framework for inference in Dynamic Bayesian Networks, i.e., recursive information processing and estimation algorithms based on Bayes' rule
• Reduced Finite State Machine (rFSM) - a small and powerful statechart implementation in Lua

The latest documentation and API reference is currently available at https://orocos-toolchain.github.io/.

The Orocos project provides binary packages as part of the ROS distribution for various platforms. Check and follow the ROS installation instructions, then run

sudo apt-get install ros-${ROS_DISTRO}-orocos-toolchain

to install the Orocos Toolchain packages.

As a ROS user, you might also be interested in the rtt_ros_integration project:

sudo apt-get install ros-${ROS_DISTRO}-rtt-ros-integration

First, clone this repository and its submodules with the command

git clone https://github.com/orocos-toolchain/orocos_toolchain.git --recursive

If you already have a working copy, make sure that all submodules are up-to-date:

git submodule update --init --recursive

The next step is to configure the toolchain according to your needs:

./configure --prefix=<installation prefix> [<options>]

Usage: ./configure [<options>] [<additional cmake arguments>]

Available options:

  --prefix <prefix>        Installation prefix (-DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX)

  --{en|dis}able-corba     Enable/Disable CORBA transport plugin (-DENABLE_CORBA)
  --omniorb                Select CORBA implementation OmniORB
  --tao                    Select CORBA implementation TAO

configure is nothing else than a simple wrapper around CMake. Check ./configure --help for the latest available options.

Last but not least, build the toolchain by running

make install [-j<parallel jobs>]