AMiRo-OS

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.

################################################################################

#                                                                              #

#        RRRRRRRR   EEEEEEEE     AAA     DDDDDDDD   MM     MM  EEEEEEEE        #

#        RR     RR  EE          AA AA    DD     DD  MMM   MMM  EE              #

#        RR     RR  EE         AA   AA   DD     DD  MMMM MMMM  EE              #

#        RRRRRRRR   EEEEEE    AA     AA  DD     DD  MM MMM MM  EEEEEE          #

#        RR   RR    EE        AAAAAAAAA  DD     DD  MM     MM  EE              #

#        RR    RR   EE        AA     AA  DD     DD  MM     MM  EE              #

#        RR     RR  EEEEEEEE  AA     AA  DDDDDDDD   MM     MM  EEEEEEEE        #

#                                                                              #

################################################################################

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

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

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.

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