What is swiftrobot?

swiftrobot is a lightweight and easy-to-use middleware for robotic applications. It provides a way to communicate between different components of a robot's software stack, allowing for seamless integration and rapid development.

A USB connection between a macOS and iOS device can be used to get a higher bandwith and lower latency. Swiftrobot will automatically use USB communication if available. Using the C++ implementation swiftrobotc, it is possible to communicate between iOS devices and Linux devices via USB. This allows for an easy and real-time usable integration of iPhones and iPads as sensors, controllers, or displays for your robot.

With swiftrobot's publish/subscribe messaging system, you can easily build distributed systems for robots. This package includes a Swift implementation of the middleware, and it can be used to communicate between different processes on the same machine or across a local network.

Possible use cases:

• Perception, SLAM and path planning done on iOS device, which sends out control commands via USB to robot hardware controller.
• Visualisation and debugging of robots software stack on a Wi-Fi connected iOS device
• Distributed sensor network with iOS devices

Features

• Bonjour service discovery, so clients connect to each other without any manual configuration needed.
• Publish/Subscribe messaging system based on shared memory or TCP sockets.
• USB communication for iOS devices
• Custom message types. (Planned)
• Parameter distribution which enables dynamic reconfigure of software components. (Planned)
• Recording and playback of message passings with time encoding. (Planned)

Installation

To use this package, you can add it as a dependency in your Swift package manager manifest file.

dependencies: [
    .package(url: "https://github.com/danielriege/swiftrobot.git", from: "0.1.0")
]

Example

To use the SwiftRobotClient class, you can create an instance of the class and call its methods to publish and subscribe to messages.

local message passing

let client = SwiftRobotClient()

client.subscribe(channel: 0x01) { (msg: base_msg.UInt8Array) in
   // do things with the msg
}

let pubMsg = base_msg.UInt8Array(data: [0xbe, 0xef])
client.publish(channel: 0x01, msg: pubMsg)

Note: For best practices it is advised to only use one SwiftRobotClient instance per process, so shared memory is used and the bytes don't go through the kernel.

local and network based message passing

let client = SwiftRobotClient()

client.start()

client.subscribe(channel: 0x00) { (msg: internal_msg.UpdateMsg) in
   print("Client \(msg.clientID) is now \(msg.status)")
}

Using the start() method the client will advertise its service using bonjour in the local domain with the _swiftrobot._tcp type. Additionally, it will start listening for incomming connections and connect to other clients in a pre-existing network.

Note: On channel 0 informations about other client connections will be published.

License

This package is licensed under the MIT license. See the LICENSE file for more information.