Perceptive and torque-control NMPC wiki¶

Software Overview¶

Openrobots¶

Collections of all the open-source software used at LAAS. You can find more details in Openrobots Wiki-Homepage

GenoM¶

The Generator of Modules, aka GenoM, is [*Cite paper*] a generator of modules, i.e. components, for different middlewares (examples of middlewares are ROS, YARP), i.e. it allows to create components independently from the choice of the used middleware.
This allows a great code re-usability and to abstract the user from any specific choice of a middleware. You just write the component once and then you can select one among the supported middleware; for each middleware GenoM needs a template.
Originally GenoM has been developed tightly with Pocolibs, then from version 3, aka GenoM3, other middleware templates has been provided, like ROS.

Resources¶

Here it is reported a list of other resources in which you can find more details about GenoM.

• *GenoM Homepage* hosted on git.Openrobots.org, where you can find also:
  • its *Wiki* ,
  • and its *Documentation* ,
• or you can have also a look here, where you can find more detailed material - like a manual and some slides - in section Documentation.

Pocolibs¶

As stated before, *Pocolibs* is a middleware, like ROS, YARP.
As already said, GenoM was originally made for it.

• Why are we using Pocolibs and not other popular middlewares, such as ROS?
  • It has been developed here at LAAS, thus we have total control on its development and we can even develop other custom features necessary for our projects;
  • it is more performant and fast compared to ROS, when running on a single machine, thanks to the exploitation of shared memory. ROS, on the other hand, uses a network layer for sending messages between one node and another one, this leads to greater delays and loss of performances.

Robotpkg¶

If you are going to use GenoM then you will definitely meet *Robotpkg*.
It is a compilation framework and packaging system for installing robotics software developed by the robotic community. It also contains packages for some general, third-party open-source software that the robotics software depends on and that is not commonly packaged by major unix distributions.

In orther words it is a simple way to package software together and it allows to automatically manage all the dependecies (libraries and other modules) which the softwares depend on.
More detailed info on how it works and on how to use it can be found in its *Documentation* (Robotpkg Homepage->Documentation).

Robotpkg is the simplest way to install GenoM since it allows you to download and compile GenoM automatically without the need to worry about all the dependencies.