dls2-barebone

This repository contains the official implementation of D. Wildgrube Bertol, G. Fink, M. Marchitto, Y. Nisticò, M. Pestarino, and C. Semini, “DLS2: A distributed microcomponent-based robotic software architecture”, which is currently under review.

It provides a reusable, buildable base for DLS2 robot control applications. It brings together the DLS2 framework, the Robotlib robot interface, the pinocchio-gluecode, RViz visualization support, and a ROS 2 interface for shared message definitions and network settings.

Project Status

This project is currently in pre-release and under active development.

Repository Structure

Component	Path	Description
DLS2 Framework	dls2/	Core control middleware. Contains modules for control, state estimation, messaging (DDS/IDL), plugins, state machines, signal handling, logging, and utilities.
Robotlib	robotlib/	Generic C++ robot abstraction layer. Provides a common API (kinematics, dynamics, Jacobians, data structures) that controllers target, independent of any specific robot morphology. Uses a factory pattern with dlopen for runtime-loadable robot libraries.
GlueCode	pinocchio-gluecode/	Robot-specific implementation of the Robotlib interface based on Pinocchio. Loaded at runtime as a shared library.
RViz Interface	visualizers/rviz_interface/	Visualization support for RViz.
ROS 2 Interface	dls2_ros2_interface/	Bidirectional message bridge between DLS2 IDL definitions and ROS 2 .msg types. Provides tooling to convert .idl ↔ .msg and scripts to configure FastDDS discovery so ROS 2 and DLS2 communicate over the same DDS domain.

Documentation

To generate the documentation:

cd dls2-barebone
doxygen docs/Doxifile

To open the documentation double click on the file build/html/index.html.

Installation

Pull the docker image

You can pull the docker image with the following command:

docker pull ghcr.io/iit-dlslab/dls2-dev:latest

Clone repository

mkdir dls_ws
cd dls_ws
git clone --recursive https://github.com/iit-DLSLab/dls2-barebone.git

Open docker image

docker run -it --rm \
  --name dls_container \
  --hostname docker \
  --gpus all \
  --privileged \
  --network host \
  -e DISPLAY="$DISPLAY" \
  -e DLS=2 \
  -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix:rw \
  -v "$PWD:$PWD" \
  -w "$PWD" \
  ghcr.io/iit-dlslab/dls2-dev:latest \
  /bin/bash

Remember that to attach another terminal to the already running container you can do

docker exec -it dls_container /bin/bash

Build

cd dls2-barebone
mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
make
sudo make install

The first compilation takes a bit of time because it needs to compile all the messages (the ROS2 default ones and the DLS2 ones).

Run example

To run a simple node example follow these steps:

• open a shell, run the container and build the code as explained in the "Open docker image" and "Build" sections above.

• Run the fastdds servers and the supervisor

  dls --servers --super

• open a second terminal, launch the console:

  docker exec -it dls_container /bin/bash

  dls -lconsole

• load the hello_world_plugin

  Supervisor::loadPeriodicAppPlugin hello_world_plugin

  and activate the plugin typing:

  hello_world_plugin::activate

  You will see a dummy print in the terminal where you have launched the Supervisor.

• unload the hello_world_plugin

  Supervisor::unloadPeriodicAppPlugin hello_world_plugin

• stop DLS2 with CTRL-C in any of the terminal

Contributing

Feel free to open issues and/or PRs!

TODOs:

• Integrated and ready-to-go examples with state estimator (MUSE) coming soon

Mantainers

This repository is mantained by Marco Marchitto and Michele Pestarino.