yarprobotinterface: Start multiple YARP devices as specified in an xml file.

Collaboration diagram for yarprobotinterface: Start multiple YARP devices as specified in an xml file.:

Description

The yarprobotinterface is a command line tool that is useful to launch multiple YARP devices at once.

Its name derives from the fact that the first and main use of the yarprobotinterface was used as the main program to provide a network "interface", via YARP Network Server Wrappers (NWS) devices, to a robot.

However, the yarprobotinterface can be used to launch YARP devices of any kind. In a sense, it is an extension of the yarpdev command, that instead can be used only to launch one or two devices, while yarprobotinterface can launch an arbitrary number of YARP devices.

The details of the xml format of the files loaded by yarprobotinterface are documented in YARP robotinterface XML files .

Parameters

--config ./configdir/config.xml

• Specify the path of the .xml file to load and that describes the YARP devices to launch.

--portprefix portprefix

• If specified, this values override the portprefix attribute of the robot element of the xml file.

--verbose

• If this option is specified, enable verbose output of the xml parser.

--dryrun

• If this option is specified, then xml file is only loaded without actually opening devices. This option is useful to validate if xml files are well formed.

--enable_tags (xxx yyy ... zzz)

• This options can be used to enable optional devices which have been marked with the in enabled_by attribute in the xml file. See YARP robotinterface XML files

--disable_tags (xxx yyy ... zzz)

• This options can be used to disable included devices which have been marked with the in disabled_by attribute in the xml file. See YARP robotinterface XML files

--autocloseAfterStart

• This options automatically closes yarprobotinterface after opening all requested devices. It can be used for debugging purposes to check the behavior of selected devices and if they properly close.

Configuration Files

yarprobotinterface loads the xml file from the location specified in the --config option.

description of opened devices

yarprobotinterface keeps track of the opened devices using an internal storage (a robotDescriptionStorage). This operation is performed automatically by yarprobotinterface, but it is not exposed outside by default. If the user want to access it, it has to instantiate a robotDescription_nws_yarp and attach it to the storage. This can be done adding to the xml configuration a block similar to:

<device name="robotDescriptionNWS" type="robotDescription_nws_yarp">
    <param name="local">/yarpRobotInterface/devices/rpc</param>
    <action phase="startup" level="5" type="attach">
        <param name="device"> yriDescriptionStorage </param>
    </action>
    <action phase="shutdown" level="5" type="detach" />
</device>

Note that yriDescriptionStorage is default name of the internal robotDescriptionStorage and that /yarpRobotInterface/devices/rpc is the rpc port opened by the nws. A robotDescription_nwc_yarp can be used to connect to the nws device and get list of opened devices and their configuration run-time. An example of such mechanism can be found in yarpmotorgui which by default tries to open a robotDescription_nwc_yarp to the get a list of all controlBoard_nws_yarp devices in order to connect to he various parts of the robot.

It is highly recommended that every device opened by yarprobotinterface derives from interface yarp::dev::IDeviceDriverParams, which is automatically present if the device parameters parser has been generated with the tool yarpDeviceParamParserGenerator. By doing so, yarprobotinterface will be able to access also to the device configuration parameters, exposing them to external application for inspection.

If this interface is not available, yarprobotinterface will generate a warning yarp::dev::IDeviceDriverParams not available in the startup phase, but it will continue its normal execution.

A run-time generated list of the devices opened by yarprobotinterface can by obtained by the command line tool yarpRobotDescriptionInfo: A tool to inspect YARP devices used by yarprobotinterface which also generates a graphical connection map of them.