• Introduction
• Requirements
• Installation
• Repository
• Documentation
• Running the tests

Introduction

RTShell provides commands used to manage individual RT components and managers, as well as complete RT Systems. It can be used with the OpenRTM-aist middleware or middlewares that use a compatible CORBA-based introspection system.

Many of the commands allow components and managers running on nameservers to be treated like a file system. Directories can be entered, components can be cat'd and activated/deactivated/reset, connections made and removed, and so on.

Other commands are used in conjunction with RtsProfile XML/YAML files to manage complete RT Systems. These are rtresurrect, rtteardown, rtcryo, rtstart and rtstop.

The commands are aimed at users of OpenRTM-aist who wish to manage components on low-resource systems, systems where a GUI is not available (particularly where no network connection is available to manage components from another computer), as well as those who face other difficulties using RTSystemEditor. Being familiar with using a command-line is a benefit when using these commands of RTShell.

This software is developed at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology. Approval number H23PRO-1214. The development was financially supported by the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organisation Project for Strategic Development of Advanced Robotics Elemental Technologies.

This software is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License version 3 (LGPL3). See LICENSE.txt.

Requirements

• RTCTree is required.
• RTSProfile is required.
• Python 2.7 is required.
• OpenRTM - Python - 1.0.0 or higher is required for rtprint, rtinject and rtlog.
• omniORB-py 4.x or higher is required.
• For installation from source, Sphinx is required to compile the document.

When installing by pip, RTCTree and RTSProfile are automatically installed.

Installation

There are several methods of installation available:

• (Preferred method) Use pip to install the PyPi package.

1. Install pip if it is not already installed. See https://pip.pypa.io/en/latest/installing/
2. Execute the following command to install RTShell:

    $ pip install rtshell

3. Execute the post-installation setup:

    $ rtshell_post_install

4. On Windows, you will need to ensure that your Python scripts directory is in the PATH variable. Typically, this will be something like C:\Python27\Scripts\ (assuming Python 2.7 installed in C:\Python27\).
5. After downloading from the repository or source archive, decompress and install it in the appropriate directory.
6. Expand the source.

    $ cd /home/blurgle/src/
    $ tar -xvzf rtshell.tar.gz

7. Run setup.py.

    $ python setup.py install

8. Execute the following command and perform the post-installation action.

    $ rtshell_post_install

9. On Windows, set environment variables as necessary. Normally it is set by default, but if it is not set you need to set it yourself. Please make sure the directory of Python script is set to PATH environment variable. Normally these are C:\Python 27\Scripts\(if Python was installed in C:\Python 27\). On Windows, it is possible to install using an installer program.

Repository

The latest source is stored in a Git repository at github, available at http://github.com/gbiggs/rtshell. You can download it as a zip file or tarball by clicking the "Download Source" link on that page. Alternatively, use Git to clone the repository. This is better if you wish to contribute patches:

 $ git clone git://github.com/gbiggs/rtshell.git

Documentation

The document is provided as a manpage (in Windows, it is provided in HTML). It will be installed in ${prefix}/share/man. It is necessary to add this path to the environment variable $ MANPATH. For example, if RTShell was installed in /home/blurgle, add the following line to .bashrc :

 export MANPATH=/home/blag/share/man:${MANPATH}

Running the tests

The command tests can be run from the source directory using a command like the following:

 ~/src/rtshell $ ./test/test_cmds.py ~/share/OpenRTM-aist/examples/rtcs/

The argument to the test_cmds.py command is a directory containing RTC shared libraries that can be loaded into a manager. It must contain the libraries for Motor, Controller and Sensor.

An individual command's tests can be run by specifying those tests after the command. For example:

 $ ./test/test_cmds.py ~/share/OpenRTM-aist/examples/rtcs/ rtactTests

This will run only the tests for the rtact command.