How to deploy your OROCOS application

Read the OROCOS deployment manual for detailed information on how to use the deployer.

Run the orocos deployer using rosrun

rosrun ocl deployer-gnulinux -ldebug -s deploy.ops

Where you define your launch configuration in the deploy.ops script, e.g.

   1 #import your OROCOS library (dependencies are automatically resolved)
   2 import("my{Ros/OROCOS}Pkg")
   3 
   4 #Load your OROCOS component (ComponentName as defined using the ORO_CREATE_* macro and Comp the name as you like the component to be known for the TaskBrowser)
   5 loadComponent("Comp","ComponentName")
   6 
   7 #Load properties
   8 loadService("Comp","marshalling")
   9 Comp.marshalling.loadProperties("cpf/myCompProp.cpf")
  10 
  11 # Configure / Start components 
  12 Comp.configure()
  13 Comp.start()

The myCompProp.cpf file declares the Components properties using XML syntax:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>                                                                                                                            
  <!DOCTYPE properties SYSTEM "cpf.dtd">                                                                                                                            
    <properties>
     <simple name="init_file" type="string"><description>Name of the initialisation file</description><value>init.xml</value></simple>
    </properties>  

Roslaunch for OROCOS components

From orocos toolchain 2.2 and onwards, it is possible to start your OROCOS component(s) using a roslaunch file. In that way you can also give your component a more understandable name when using the rtt_ros_integration.

E.g, a roslaunch file myComp.launch to start the ocl deployer in debug mode and load the deploy.ops script in the myRosPkg package:

 <launch>                                                                                                                                                 
   <node name="myNodeName" pkg="ocl" type="deployer-gnulinux" launch-prefix="konsole -e" args="-ldebug -s $(find myRosPkg)/deploy.ops --">
   </node>           
  </launch> 

Important remarks:

• The arguments you used to pass to the deployer on the command line, are now passed using the args attribute. You can use '$(find myRosPkg)' syntax to avoid using absolute file paths.
• The launch-prefix attribute makes the orocos deployer start in it's own terminal, which makes it possible to interact with it.
• Always append the arguments with two dashes ("--"). Your launch file will not work otherwise: the deployer will start but shutdown immediately. This has to do with ROS appending extra arguments to the args attribute. The 2 dashes are used to separate the deployer arguments from the additional ROS arguments.

• The deployer might still fail in parsing your deploy.ops script if you use it to load additional properties. Nodes started with roslaunch are launched from within your HOME directory, which probably makes rtt not find the property file. Solution here is to either use an absolute path to point to the property file or use the rtt_ros_param services.