RAFCON

• Documentation: Hosted on Read the Docs
• Homepage: DLR-RM.github.io/RAFCON/
• License: EPL
• Cheatsheet: Download Cheatsheet
• Usage with ROS2: RAFCON with ROS2 Tutorial

Develop your robotic tasks using an intuitive graphical user interface

RAFCON uses hierarchical state machines, featuring concurrent state execution, to represent robot programs. It ships with a graphical user interface supporting the creation of state machines and contains IDE-like debugging mechanisms. Alternatively, state machines can be programmatically generated using RAFCON's API.

Universal application

RAFCON is written in Python, can be extended with plugins and is hard- and middleware-independent.

Visual programming

The sophisticated graphical editor can be used for the creation, execution, and debugging of state machines.

Collaborative working

Share and reuse your state machines in the form of libraries, stored as JSON strings in text files.

Installation preparations

Before installing RAFCON, Python >=3.9, pip, and setuptools are required on your system. Most of the other dependencies are automatically resolved by pip/setuptools, but not all of them. Those need to be installed manually, too.

General requirements

• Python >=3.9
• pip (recent version required)
• pdm (recent version required)

Installation requirements

Tested under Ubuntu 24.04

sudo apt update
sudo apt install python3-dev python3-pip python3-setuptools
sudo apt install libcairo2-dev pkg-config libgirepository1.0-dev
sudo apt install gir1.2-gtk-3.0 gir1.2-gtksource-3.0

Installing RAFCON

Tested under Ubuntu 24.04

It is recommended to install RAFCON inside a virtual environment. Once created, make sure setuptools is installed:

pip install "setuptools>=83"

Then, simply install RAFCON with:

pip install rafcon --user

The --user flag is optional. If not set, RAFCON is installed globally (in this case you normally need root privileges).

If you run into any problems installing and starting RAFCON, please let us know in the issues!

Of course, you can also directly use the RAFCON sources from GitHub.

cd /install/directory
git clone https://github.com/DLR-RM/RAFCON.git rafcon

Start RAFCON

No matter which installation option you choose, RAFCON can be started from any location (make sure /usr/local/bin or ~/.local/bin is in your PATH environment variable):

rafcon

On a multi-Python setup, start RAFCON using:

python<your-version> -m rafcon

Uninstallation

If you want to uninstall RAFCON, all you need to do is call

pip uninstall rafcon

Funding

This project has received public funding from the European Union NextGenerationEU within the Important Project of Common European Interest – Cloud Infrastructures and Services (IPCEI-CIS) under grant agreement 13IPC034 (ROX project).