AMiRo-OS

About & License

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

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..2020  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>

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.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Contents

========

1.  Required Software

2.  Folder Structure

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1 Required Software

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

Since AMiRo-Apps depends on the AMiRo-OS and µRtWare 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.md file of AMiRo-OS and µRtWare

respectively.

2 Folder Structure

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

At its root, the AMiRo-Apps project has seven folders to distiquish between the

most fundamental parts:

2.1 `apps/`

-----------

This folder includes individual applications, which can used by

configigurations (see `configurations/`). Apps will usually be implemented

as nodes for the middleware and provide according interfaces via some message

type(s) (see `messagetypes/`).

2.2 `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: setup and build everything.

Note that each configuration needs to explicitely support a module and that

there can never be an implicit default configuration.

2.3 `doc/`

----------

Any documentation related files are located in this directory.

2.4 `messagetypes/`

-------------------

Apps shoud take advantage of the middleware and thus implement nodes, which

communicate via messages and/or requests. Such messages/requests may have

payloads of arbitrary types, which can be defined in this folder.

2.5 `middleware/`

-----------------

This folder contains the µRtWare submodule and interface files.

2.6 `os/`

---------

This folder contains the AMiRo-OS submodule and interface files.

2.7 `tools/`

------------

Helpful tools can be found in this dirctory.