Robotics Service Bus

Overview¶

We are happy to announce the release of version 0.5 of RSB. The development activities in this cycle focused primarily on API improvements and the integration of causal vectors. Moreover, complete compatibility for MSVC 2010 is now ensured and MacOS compatibility has been improved. In the process, about 60 issues have been created and subsequently resolved.

This RSB release is available in the following forms:

• Source archives
• Pre-compiled self-installing archives
• Debian packages for different Ubuntu Linux versions

These can be downloaded from the continuous integration server:

• C++
• Python
• Java
• Common Lisp

As always, bugs, feature requests and enhancement proposals can be reported in the issue tracker

Please note that

• RSB clients using the 0.5 version of RSB cannot generally communicate with clients using a previous RSB version.
• The Spread transport is no longer active by default (see below).
• The API is in some parts not backwards-compatible.

The following paragraphs describe the changes in more detail. An overview regarding the current state of the different implementations is available in the wiki.

For an even more detailed list of fixed bugs, added features and other enhancements, see https://code.cor-lab.org/projects/rsb/versions/21

General¶

• A tutorial is now included in the RSB source tree: source:/branches/0.5/tutorials
• Several introductory talks are now included in the RSB source tree: source:/branches/0.5/talks
• RSB-related build jobs on the continuous integration sever have been reorganized
• Simple benchmarking tools are available in the RSB Benchmarking project
• The #rsb IRC channel on the freenode network can now be used for additional support and discussion
• Installation instructions have been improved

Network Protocol and Configuration¶

• Causal vectors have been added to the network protocol. They allow to tag which events caused another event.
• The default transport configuration has been changed:
  • The inprocess transport is now enabled by default
  • The Spread transport is now disabled by default and has to be enabled explicitly when network communication is desired. This can e.g. be done by adding the user config file ~/.config/rsb.conf with these lines:
    

    [transport.spread]
    enabled = 1
    
    [transport.inprocess]
    enabled = 0
    

Tools¶

• The C++ logger now displays causal vectors
• The Common Lisp logger now displays causal vectors
• The Common Lisp logger now displays configurable statistics
• The Common Lisp logger now allows configuring the columns in the "compact" formatting style
• A tool for performing RPCs from the commandline has been added

C++¶

• Support for causal vectors has been added
• The client API for creation and configuration of participants and events has been simplified
• Convenience functions for participant creation without the factory have been added
  Suggested by: Robert Haschke
• OriginFilter has been added
• Compilation time has been reduced
  Suggested by: Matthias Rolf
• A name-clash with a Qt macro has been resolved
  Reported by: Matthias Rolf
• Event dispatching now allows multiple threading strategies
• Performance Improvements
  • Caching of Spread group names
  • <-comparison of EventId s

Java¶

• Support for causal vectors has been added
• OriginFilter has been added

Python¶

• Support for causal vectors has been added
• OriginFilter has been added

Common Lisp¶

• Support for causal vectors has been added