sichitong / ach

IPC for Real-Time Robot Control

OVERVIEW

Ach is an Inter-Process Communication (IPC) mechanism and library. It is especially suited for communication in real-time systems that sample data from physical processes. Ach eliminates the Head-of-Line Blocking problem for applications that always require access to the newest message. Ach is efficient, robust, and formally verified. It has been tested and demonstrated on a variety of physical robotic systems. Source code for Ach is available under an Open Source BSD-style license.

INSTALLATION

./configure && make && make install

See the INSTALL file for details.

Alternatively, if you are using Debian or Ubuntu, you can use the golems.org APT repo.

1. Add the following to /etc/apt/sources:

   deb http://code.golems.org/debian squeeze golems.org

(substitute the codename for your distribution in place of squeeze, e.g. wheezy, precise)

2. sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install libach-dev ach-utils ach-dkms

3. sudo dpkg-reconfigure ach-utils

DOCUMENTATION

• Manual: http://code.golems.org/pkg/ach/manual and ./doc/manual/ach-manual.html
• API docs: http://code.golems.org/pkg/ach/api and ./doc/html
• Man Pages: http://code.golems.org/pkg/ach/man and ./doc/man
• Papers: http://www.golems.org/projects/ach.html
• Example Code: ./src/ach-example.c

See ./INSTALL for details on generating the documentation.

MAILING LISTS

• Announcements: http://groups.google.com/group/ach-announce
• General Help: http://groups.google.com/group/ach-help
• Development: http://groups.google.com/group/ach-devel

LANGUAGE BINDINGS

Language bindings are included for Common Lisp, Python, and Java.

• Common Lisp bindings use CFFI and can be loaded with ASDF.

• Python bindings are a C extension module and a Python module 'ach'. This can be installed either via make install or via Python's distutils/pip.

• C++ bindings wrap the C API. See ./include/Ach.hpp

• Java bindings via the Java Native Interface (JNI). See ./doc/javadoc or http://code.golems.org/pkg/ach/javadoc/

See the INSTALL file for details.

FORMAL MODEL

Ach has been formally verified using the SPIN model checker. This formal model is included in the source distribution under the ./spin/ directory.