The Orocos Toolchain

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

Documentation

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

Get Started?

Install binary packages

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

Build the toolchain from source

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>]