Important: The xBot Framework is a very early Work-In-Progress (WIP) project. It is not ready for production use, and the codebase is subject to change without notice. Use it at your own risk, and be prepared for significant modifications and updates as the project evolves.
Building robust and reusable robotics systems can be challenging. The Robot Operating System (ROS) provides powerful middleware for abstracting communication between high-level components, but struggles at the hardware level, requiring specialized firmware to interface with low-level devices. Existing solutions like microROS introduce a direct dependency on ROS which complicates debugging, bloats the low-level firmware and leads to tight coupling between high-level application specific code and low-level drivers.
The xBot Framework offers a lightweight, independent solution for interfacing directly with sensors and actuators without adding heavy dependencies. This new framework helps integrate hardware components seamlessly into the broader robotics ecosystem.
- 🖥 Service-Based Architecture: Low level features (e.g. sensors or actuators) are implemented as a service, described by a JSON interface and implemented as C++ classes. This modular design allows for reusable hardware communication. Service implementations can be done either on a microcontroller or a Linux system, since the communication is abstracted from the actual operating system.
- ⚙️ Hardware Communication Simplified: Define services in JSON format to generate a C++ code template, allowing for easy communication with hardware components such as ESCs, IMUs, and GPIOs.
- 🧩 Lightweight and Portable: The framework has minimal dependencies and avoids dynamic memory allocation, making it ideal for microcontrollers, but can also be used on Linux systems.
- 🔍 Service Discovery: The framework includes automatic service discovery, making it easy to connect your low-level services to your application specific high-level code.
- ⚙️ Runtime: The Runtime:
- Web UI: Visually explore devices, monitor data, and test actuators. (Status: Planned)
- Firmware Update: Update the firmware on your board directly through the web interface using our included Ethernet bootloader. (Status: Planned)
- REST API: Discover services programmatically. (Status: Working)
- Plugin System: Write an application-specific plugin which gets loaded by the runtime to bridge to your high-level code.
- 🚀 Performant Serialization: Data is transmitted schemaless and binary packed. This leads to less traffic and fast serialization times.
This repository contains all parts of the xbot_framework.
Use this library to provide a service to the system. An example would be publishing IMU data or providing motor control services. The library will take care of advertising your service and connecting to the runtime.
Use the libxbot-service-interface library to connect to a specific service. For example if there is an IMU service on your network, and you want to receive its data (or bridge to ROS), include libxbot-service-interface in your project to use your services.
Files in this directory are needed on both sides (service and service interface). E.g. message header definitions.
This folder contains the code generation part of the xbot_framework. Code generation is done from service.json files which describe inputs, outputs and registers of services.
The code generator will generate callbacks for inputs and sending methods for the outputs. It will also generate all code necessary for service discovery and configuration.
All dependencies are included here as submodules. Not every dependency is needed by every part of the software.
The xBot Framework is currently a work in progress, and we welcome any input or feedback. If you'd like to contribute, please read our contributing guidelines and check out our issue tracker.