Geoffrey Biggs has released a patch that integrates ROS seamlessly into OpenRTM-aist. OpenRTM-aist users can download a patch that adds in ROS transport.
Although I guess it's not a common thing yet, there have been murmurings for quite a while now here in Japan about a desire to be able to use OpenRTM-aist and ROS together. We would gain the huge range of functional software and the persistent channel-based communications of ROS, and keep the strong life-cycle and execution management of OpenRTM-aist.
So here's a patch for OpenRTM-aist that does exactly that.
This patch adds a new transport type to OpenRTM-aist specifically for communicating across ROS channels. No doubt someone will find the ability to use a persistent channel for communication useful, but the main benefit is that it gives nearly-seamless communications between components written for OpenRTM-aist and nodes written for ROS. Your network of distributed components/nodes no longer has to be in just one framework.
There are no wrappers involved. It's all native communication using the same ROS libraries as you would use in a pure-ROS system - no translation layers means maximum efficiency. You create a port type for the ROS transport, and off you go. If you already know ROS, you'll feel right at home using the ports.
The one caveat is why I say nearly-seamless: we still don't have a unified set of types (also, there are some issues with the typing system in OpenRTM-aist that we're working to sort out). Fortunately, the types issue is a hot topic amongst framework designers at the moment, so I hope we will have solved that problem before too long. :)
I have attached both the patch, for OpenRTM-aist-1.0.0, and a set of examples for each port type (publisher/subscriber/client/server). I hope to get a web page up on the OpenRTM-aist site shortly with a more detailed explanation of usage; for now, the examples and the doxygen comments in the source will point you in the right direction - it's all pretty simple.
Comments, suggestions, and improvements are welcome.
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