Software Users Guide

This guide explains how to use YARP and YARP tools to manage and run DREAM robot applications comprising a collection of components.

Setting up your machine: Running YARP

Once you have installed the DREAM software development environment you are (almost) ready to run the DREAM applications.

Before you do, you have to launch a YARP server and a YARP run server.

From the Windows 7 toolbar, launch a Command Prompt terminal and do the following.

yarp server

Now, launch another Command Prompt terminal and do this.

yarp run --server /dream1

This creates a run server named /dream1 and is used by YARP to find out where to execute the components in the application.

Using gyarpmanger to manage DREAM applications

DREAM software is just as set of interconnected components and DREAM software applications are defined by identifying the components to be used, the computers (nodes) on which they are to be run, and the connections between the various components. All this is done with a .xml application file, normally stored in the app directory.

YARP provides a GUI tool to help you run these application. This is called gyarpmanager. It is a powerful tool and you can read more about it here. For the present, just note that gyarpmanager can read a .ini configuration file to find out where the applications are (among other things).

There is a default ymanager.ini file in the root of the DREAM directory and it simply tells gyarpmanager to look for all application .xml files under the release directory.

So, to finally get started, launch another (i.e. a third) Command Prompt terminal, change directory to the DREAM root directory and enter gyarpmanager

C:/DREAM>gyarpmanager

Once this tool has been launched, you need to open the applications you want to run. Do this by opening on the Applications folder on the left-hand side and double-clicking on the application you are interested in. Find the one labelled Demo_of_protoComponent' (included with the original release of the DREAM repository) and double-click on it.

Now, click the Run the on the Demo_of_protoComponent interface panel. It will launch two components. The first one - imageSource - streams images from a file to a port (simulating a camera). The second one - protoComponent - takes these images and does some simple image processing (binary thresholding).

Next, click the Connect button to see the result.

Click Stop to stop the application, i.e. the two components.