Rock

the Robot Construction Kit

Introduction

Advanced Rock Tutorials

After having successfully gone through the basic tutorials, you might be interested in going deeper into Rock. Tutorials in this section deal with more advanced topics, giving you more freedom to setup your system.

What to expect from the advanced tutorials

These tutorials are less structured than the basic tutorials. They cover specific topics that you might want to learn about:

  • Deployments. The basic tutorials showed you how to run tasks. This tutorial will show you how to customize how tasks should be executed for your particular system. For instance, one can declare that a task is periodic with a period of 0.1s by default, but for a particular system, choose a period of 1s.
  • Log data and replay. These tutorials will describe how to turn on logging, manage the resulting logfiles and replay the data in running components for e.g. testing.
  • Vizkit Widgets and Vizkit 3D plugin creation. How to extend Vizkit, Rock’s visualization library, by adding new widgets and/or new 3D visualization plugins. How to use the Qt designer to create graphical interfaces.
  • Using avahi. How to use avahi (a common mDNS implementation) to resolve the task names instead of a centralized CORBA name server.

Installing the tutorial results

In case you don’t want to write all the packages yourself, there is a package available for the Rock tutorials so that you can easily retrieve them. If you want to add the tutorials to your installation, add the package set to your autoproj/manifest.

autoproj/manifest should look like:

package_sets:
- github: rock-core/package_set
- github: rock-tutorials/package_set

layout:
- rock.core
- rock.tutorials