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rtctree =======

Introduction

rtctree is a Python library providing an easy-to-use API for interacting with running RT Components and RTM-based systems running on OpenRTM-aist-1.0. It allows developers to manage these systems from other programs without needing to learn the CORBA API. Components can be started, stopped, connected together, have their configuration changed, and so on.

This software is developed at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology. Approval number H23PRO-1229. The development was financially supported by the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organisation Project for Strategic Development of Advanced Robotics Elemental Technologies. This software is licensed under the Eclipse Public License -v 1.0 (EPL). See LICENSE.TXT.

Requirements

rtctree requires omniorb-py, including omniidl with the Python backend. If you have installed OpenRTM-python, you will have these installed already. If not, you will need to install them manually.

rtctree uses the new string formatting operations that were introduced in Python 2.6. It will not function with an earlier version of Python. It has not been tested with Python 3 and it is likely that several changes will be necessary to make it function using this version of Python.

For Ubuntu users, if you are using a version of Ubuntu prior to 9.04, you will need to install a suitable Python version by hand. You may want to consider upgrading to Ubuntu 9.04 or later (10.04 offers LTS).

Installation

There are several methods of installation available:

1. Download the source from either the repository (see “Repository,” below) or a source archive, extract it somewhere, and install it into your Python distribution:

a) Extract the source, e.g. to a directory /home/blag/src/rtctree

b) Run setup.py to install rtctree to your default Python installation::

  $ python setup.py install

c) If necessary, set environment variables. These should be set by default, but if not you will need to set them yourself. On Windows, you will need to ensure that your Python site-packages directory is in the PYTHONPATH variable and the Python scripts directory is in the PATH variable. Typically, these will be something like C:\Python26\Lib\site-packages\ and C:\Python26\Scripts\, respectively (assuming Python 2.6 installed in C:\Python26\).

1. Use the Windows installer. This will perform the same job as running setup.py (see #2), but saves opening a command prompt. You may still need to add paths to your environment variables (see step c, above).

Environment variables

The following environment variables are used:

RTCTREE_ORB_ARGS A list of arguments, separated by semi-colons, to pass to the ORB when creating it. Optional.

RTCTREE_NAMESERVERS A list of name server addresses, separated by semi-colons, to parse when creating the RTCTree. Each server in the list will be added to the tree. Optional.

The only variable that should normally be set by the user is RTCTREE_NAMESERVERS. Set this to a list of name server addresses, separated by semi-colons, that you want rtcshell to interact with. For example, in a Bash shell, you can run the following::

$ export RTCTREE_NAMESERVERS=localhost;192.168.0.1:65346;example.com

The RTC Tree

The core of the library is the RTC Tree::

import rtctree.tree tree = rtctree.tree.RTCTree()

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