The Rock development team is proud to announce the official public
release of the Robot Construction Kit (Rock).
http://rock-robotics.org
Rock is a software framework for the development of robotic systems. It
relies heavily on Ruby to implement its toolchain.
The underlying component model is based on Orocos/RTT (Real Time
Toolkit). Rock provides all the tools required to set up and run
high-performance and reliable robotic systems for a wide variety of
applications in research and industry. It contains a rich collection of
ready-to-use drivers and modules for use in your own system, and can
easily be extended by adding new components. The framework was developed
to specifically address the following issues in existing solutions:
sustainable systems.
The architecture and the tools in Rock are designed with
long-running systems in mind. In practice this means that for us,
error detection, reporting and handling are key in any robotic
architecture.
scalability.
Provide the tools to be able to manage big systems with minimum
fuss. But we don’t require you to learn about these (complex) tools
right away: as soon as you use Rock’s component development tool,
oroGen, you have the guarantee that your components can be
integrated - from simple scenarios using hard-coded C++ behaviors,
to Ruby scripts, up to the complete system monitoring tools.
reusable code-base.
Even though we think that the rock toolchain is one of the best out
there, some other people might feel differently. And they might be
right. That’s why in Rock most of the functionality from control
to data display through to data processing is implemented in a way
that is totally independent from Rock’s integration framework.
That’s right: just pick our drivers, localization algorithms and
control loops and add them into your integration framework. You
don’t have to do anything on our side, as the code is completely
independent from the integration parts.
Dive in with the
installation
http://rock-robotics.org/documentation/installation.html
tutorials
http://rock-robotics.org/documentation/tutorials/index.html
and have a look at the framework functionality !
http://rock-robotics.org/documentation/
So far, the development of the Robot Construction Kit has been supported
by the DFKI Robotics Innovation Center (Robotics Exploration Laboratory) in
Bremen, Germany. However, it is an open platform, so feel free to join.
Most packages in the Rock distribution are under an LGPL v2 or later
license.
The Rock Development Team
Contact: [email protected]