roboglia 0.0.11

Robotics Framework unsing Dynamixel SDK, I2C, SPI

Roboglia

roboglia is a framework that helps developers with the setup of robots in a more reusable fashion. Most of the times the creation of robots involve integrating actuators, sensors, cameras and microphones, periodically accessing the information provided by these or supplying commands according to the desired activities.

The name roboglia is derived from the glial cells present in the brian. Their role is to support the neurons' functions by supplying them with nutrients, energy and disposing of waste. The analogy is that roboglia provides this boring, but very complex activity of putting together the specific functions of the physical devices used in robots in order to provide a more accessible high-level representation of the robot for the use of the "smart" control logic that sits at the top.

With roboglia, low level functionality, currently split across multiple libraries and frameworks are put together and integrated in an extensible way, making it easier for developer to focus on the higher level functionality, rather than gritty details.

Installation

You can install roboglia with pip as follows:

pip install roboglia

By default this will only install the roboglia package and the core dependencies (like PyYAML) and will not include any hardware access libraries. As different projects require different hardware communication it is up to yu to decide which of the extra dependencies need to be installed.

If you need to use Dynamixel devices, then install the dynamixel_sdk library like this:

pip install roboglia[dynamixel]

If you need to work with I2C devices, install it the following way:

pip install roboglia[i2c]

If you need SPI devices, install the extra libraries with:

pip install roboglia[spi]

If you need to install a combination of libraries, then enter them separated by commas as follows:

pip install roboglia[dynamixel,i2c]

If you wish to install all the hardware access packages then use:

pip install roboglia[all]

The all option for` extras will be updated if additional hardware channels are added to the library.

Please read carefully the installation instructions from the documentation. As roboglia needs to interact with a lot of hardware devices, it is very sensitive to the platform and OS version used. The documentation provides more details about avoiding the installation of packages that are not needed for you particular robot.

Documentation

You can access the detailed documentation on the readthedocs.io website. If you want to access the documentation in PDF format you can get it from here. There is also an epub version that can be accessed here.

Contribution

We are very receptive for contributions. Please clone the repository and submit pull requests with the desired contribution. They will be moderated and, if they add values to the users, they will be integrated. Please note that the Travis CI integration will perform the following two tests on the pull requests:

• it will run all automated tests located in tests/ folder. Please make sure that you also run them before submitting the pull request to avoid it failing. You you should install first your version of the package on your machine an then run the tests like this (you should be in the top directory of the cloned repository):

  sudo python setup.py install
  cd tests
  python all_tests.py
  

  Make sure that there are no errors issued by the unit tests. If you created new classes or new functions that are not covered by testing, then you will also need to write a test class or add a test method in an exiting class to test that functionality and submit those changes too.

• it will check PEP8 on the Python code using flake8. You should install (if you don't have it already) on your machine and run this (from the top directory of the cloned repository):

  flake8 roboglia --statistics --count
  

  Make sure flake8 does not report any problems, and correct any issues before submitting you are allowed to use # noqa directives if justified.

If you add classes or methods the documentation templates that produce the API Reference might need to be updated too, but this is something that will be moderated and can be performed centrally once the code is stable. If you know sphinx then you can attempt modifying the files in docs/ folder too and include the changes in the pull request.

If you create new Python files please add the copyright comments as they are included in the other files. Make sure you update your name at the top, we want people to receive the credit for their work. Similarly, if you change an existing file feel free to add your name at the top of the file.

Showcasing your robot

If you use roboglia in your project we will like to hear about it and we will showcase it on this page. Please open an issue with title "Showcase of robot" and provide us with information about your robot. You can send us links to the documentation or code of the robot and one picture (link to an public one) that we could use in the showcase. If you want to provide an email address for contact we will be more than happy to include that too.