Package Summary

A portable, dependency-free ROS client library in pure C

• Maintainer: Christian Holl < choll [theAt] synapticon [theDot] com >

• Author: Christian Holl
• License: BSD

• Status: UNDER DEVELOPMENT

• Source: git https://github.com/synapticon/rosc.git

Documentation

rosc is a dependency-free ROS client implementation in ANSI C which aims to support small embedded systems as well as any operating system. Its long-term goal is to become a hardened, efficient and highly portable implementation of the ROS middleware (including future evolutions of it), making it a good choice for use in industrial applications or product development.

rosc is based on a modular concept, enabling the developer to select or add the platform support he needs. A rosc node is assembled by the rosc core package which contains the basic communication structure, support packages for each platform (operating systems / bare-metal systems (AVR, ARM, XMOS etc.)) as well as communication packages for bare-metal systems which contain the handling functions for several communication interfaces.

Efficiency of rosc is driven and maintained by a bare-metal, low-memory reference scenario. For bare-metal systems each memory storage is allocated at compile time. This means that the user must define a maximum array length for messages with undefined arrays (as an example from a msg file: uint8t array[]). On systems with an operating system this is not necessary because the memory for the array will be allocated at runtime.

Essential features:

• XMLRPC communication
  • HTTP/XML parser
  • XMLRPC message generator
• Port interface handling (services, topics, XMLRPC)
• ROS message (msg-File) header/source generation
• TCPROS (un-)marshalling

Planned future extensions:

• Transport layer independency
• Realtime capability
• Development debugging features
• Compiler optimization packages
  • special size optimizations
  • using special pragmas (like pack)
• Multimaster/masterless concept

Development Status

rosc is available as alpha, and still under heavy development.

You can try out the alpha under Linux now.

Updated on: 2nd January 2014

rosc repository at GitHub

Documentation (github.io)