Welcome to YARP

YARP stands for Yet Another Robot Platform. What is it? If data is the bloodstream of your robot, then YARP is the circulatory system. It isn't the brain. It isn't the heart. But it is pretty useful to have around all the same. (For brains and hearts, see our companion project, RobotCub)

More specifically, YARP supports building a robot control system as a collection of programs communicating in a peer-to-peer way, with a family of connection types that meet the diverse, sometimes contradictory, and always changing needs of advanced robotics. We also encourage compilation and use of hardware devices in a future-proof way. Our strategic goal is to increase the longevity of robot software projects [1].

We try to make it easy to use a YARP-based system without you yourself needing to use YARP.

Getting set up:

• What exactly is YARP?
• Installing YARP
• Setting up your network for YARP
• The main YARP command-line interface

Programming:

• Getting Started with YARP Ports
• Getting Started with YARP Devices
• Port Power, Going Further with Ports
• Some examples
• Using CMake

Working with devices:

• The standard YARP device utility
• The YARP motor control interfaces
• Handling NVIDIA GPUs with YARP
• Device invocation examples
• How to add a device to YARP

Communication protocols:

• Port and connection protocols
• Standard data representation format
• The name server protocol
• Configuring YARP Connections
• Creating carriers for new kinds of connections
• Definition of terms

[1] Towards Long-Lived Robot Genes. Paul Fitzpatrick, Giorgio Metta, and Lorenzo Natale. Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 56(1):29-45. Online at http://eris.liralab.it/yarp/media/humantech07towards.pdf

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