Build and run

We provide a run-time environment based on docker which is extremely simple to build and gives immediate access to the SIT-AW-ANCHORING ROS 2 stack. Our docker environment is built on top of the ROS Humble base image. The current release of SIT-AW-ANCHORING also depends on:

  • Owlready2, to manipulate and reason over OWL ontologies. Owlready2 is available under the GNU LGPL licence v3.

  • scipy, to process inference rules that involve numerical data more rapidly and effectively than SWRL. Scipy is distributed under the BSD 3-Clause license.

How to build

Assuming that <path-to-sit-aw-anchoring> is the path to the root folder of SIT-AW-ANCHORING on your filesystem, use the following command to build it:

cd <path-to-sit-aw-anchoring>
make start-docker

The docker build process may take a while. After the build ended, a docker run command is automatically executed and your console looks like this:

Example of console output at the end of the docker build process.

That’s all! You are ready now to run the stack.

Note

The docker run command uses volumes as mechanism for persisting data generated by and used by Docker containers.

  • <path-to-sit-aw-anchoring>/src is mounted to /root/ros2_ws/src.

  • <path-to-sit-aw-anchoring>/tests is mounted to /tmp/tests.

How to run

We provide a bringup launch script to start and activate the lifecycle nodes that compose the SIT-AW-ANCHORING stack, namely ontology_manager and digital_twin_integrator. Nodes are configured with default options that you can change at run-time, using the ros2 param command-line tool.

Use this command to launch the bringup script:

ros2 launch bringup activate_launch.py

Now open another terminal and “join” the docker to run commands that enable the interaction with SIT-AW-ANCHORING nodes. To join the docker, ensure that your working directory is set to <path-to-sit-aw-anchoring> and give the command

make join-docker

You can now refer to tutorials to see some concrete example of how to interact with SIT-AW-ANCHORING nodes.