A modular framework for working with NAO robots.
The idea behind the framework, which is pretty much the same idea behind the other frameworks, is to have multiple threads that concurrently do stuff and to make them talk. The way the current framework is structured is that we have a Brain class which handles these threads, which are currently called BrainWave(s). Each BrainWave represents a thread, and you can put as many as you wish in the program. The naoTH (for what I know) uses two (Motion and Cognition), and BHuman (for what I read), has at least 4 (Motion, Cognition, Debug, and a small server detached that moves the robot).
Each BrainWave has the task of managing a bunch of modules, and it calls them in a loop forever. In this framework modules are loaded as shared libraries, which are assumed to be extended from the DynamicModuleInter- face class. Another class Blackboard, has the task of making everything communicate. More info about these classes is in the code (you can doxy- gen it).
The way this framework is intended to be used is to have some big library of data-types, which are simple structs (hopefully no methods) that contain data, and that are used to share informations by multiple modules. This library would reside in a separate repo. Each module would then also reside in their separate repo, and would import the necessary headers from the framework and the big library of data-structures that are needed, and include whatever it needs to do its work. It would then be compiled as a dynamic library, which would then be fed to the framework in order to do its job.
You can see that having modules be dynamic libraries makes it really easy to run arbitrary code in the framework, while at the same time keep- ing an extremely clean workspace as the runnable project would only need to include the dll's of the modules, the executable of the framework and whatever code you are working with, and not ALL the modules's code.
###Build Instructions### The project can be currently builded with CMake. To do that, go in the main folder of the project. From there issue the following commands:
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make
This will build the framework. If CMake fails make sure you have all required libraries installed: at least Boost 1.54, and another couple of libraries you should have anyway.
Currently there are two prototype modules in the repo, in the folder moduleExamples. Each can be compiled using the script in the folder, like so:
./compileModule Writer
./compileModule Reader
The idea is that their code would in the future reside in different repos. Also it would be cool to have a general-module-repo where a default module is kept with all the possible documentation ever about how to do things, so one can fork that and in 15 minutes already do work on new things with minimal experience.