Integrating Fawkes and ROS

Fawkes is a robot software framework and employs a component-based approach providing a massively multi-threaded and closely integrated environment for real-time robotic applications. It has some unique features like blackboard a communication infrastructure, framework feature distribution inspired by aspect-oriented programming and comes with a lot of useful libraries and tools to aid robot software development. That makes it worthwhile to consider employing Fawkes even in an existing ROS ecosystem.

The given package integrates Fawkes into ROS as a package which includes all of Fawkes and provides a ROS node that runs the Fawkes main application. Within that main application, run-time loadable plugins provide functionality. Plugins are like ROS nodelets on steroids. They are the primary development target and therefore benefit from a lot of infrastructure to easily and efficiently use framework features, interact with other components, or communicate with other ROS nodes.

There are two ways to integrate Fawkes and ROS depending from which framework the integration is approached. So it does not matter which framework is the primarily used one, for both scenarios there is an easy way to integrate the two. Fawkes plugins can participate in ROS communication by getting access to a central node handle within the Fawkes application. In this case ROS nodes have no notion that the node they interact with is written in Fawkes. But ROS nodes can also make use of Fawkes libraries to directly access the blackboard, the central data exchange hub.

This is still work in progress and further steps to integrate the two frameworks more closely are required. As an integration example the Fawkes ros-webview plugin is provided to allow ROS nodes to extend the Fawkes webview web interface.

Documentation

Preliminary instructions how to use rosfawkes are provided in the rosfawkes documentation. This is still work in progress and constantly extended. An introductory paper describes the main features of Fawkes and its benefits.