AMiRo-Apps is a collection of applications and configurations for the Autonomous
Mini Robot (AMiRo) [1]. It is tightly coupled to the AMiRo-OS and uRtWare
projects, which provide a sophisticated operating system (based on ChibiOS) amd
a real-time middleware for embedded devices.

Copyright (C) 2018..2019  Thomas Schöpping et al.
(a complete list of all authors is given below)

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at
your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU
General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

This research/work was supported by the Cluster of Excellence
Cognitive Interaction Technology 'CITEC' (EXC 277) at Bielefeld
University, which is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

Authors:
 - Thomas Schöpping          <tschoepp[at]cit-ec.uni-bielefeld.de>
 - Marc Rothmann

References:
 [1] S. Herbrechtsmeier, T. Korthals, T. Schopping and U. Rückert, "AMiRo: A
     modular & customizable open-source mini robot platform," 2016 20th
     International Conference on System Theory, Control and Computing (ICSTCC),
     Sinaia, 2016, pp. 687-692.



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This file will help you to setup all required software on your system, compile
the source code, and flash it to the AMiRo modules.

================================================================================

CONTENTS:

  1  Required software
  2  Folder structure

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1 - REQUIRED SOFTWARE
---------------------

Since AMiRo-Apps depends on the AMiRo-OS and uRtWare projects, both are included
as Git submodules. Use the provided ./setup.sh script to initialize those. When
AMiRo-OS is fully configured, there is no additional software required by
AMiRo-Apps. For further details about the initialization follow the instructions
in the script and refer to the README.txt file of AMiRo-OS and uRtWare
respectively.



2 - FOLDER STRUCTURE
--------------------

At its root, the AMiRo-Apps projects has six folders to distiquish between the
most fundamental parts:
.
├── apps
│     This folder includes individual applications, which can used by
│     configigurations. Apps will usually be implemented as nodes for the
│     middleware and provide acording interfaces via some message type(s).
├── configurations
│     Each configuration combines multiple apps and distributes them among any
│     supported modules. Furthermore, configurations may modify parameters for
│     each module individually. Finally, each configuration should come with a
│     makefile, so a user can just use this to build and flash the whole setup.
│     For better understanding, have a look at this example:
│       - module A: using apps 1, 2 and 3 with parameters X and Y.
│       - module B: using apps 1 and 4 with parameter X.
│       - module C: using apps 1, 5, 6 and 7 with parameters X and Z.
│       - Makefile: set and build everything.
│     Note that each configuration needs to explicitely support a module and
│     that there can never be an implicit default configuration.
├── messagetypes
│     Apps shoud take advantage of the middleware and thus implement nodes,
│     which communicate via messages. Such messages may have payloads of
│     arbitrary types, which can be defined in this folder.
├── middleware
│     This folder contains the µRtWare submodule and interface files.
├── os
│     This folder contains the AMiRo-OS submodule and interface files.
└── tools
      Usable tools can be found in this dirctory.

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