wb-toolbox v5, blockfactory v0.8, whole-body-controllers v2.0

[diegoferigo]

With the merge of robotology/robotology-superbuild#194 we are finally finalizing the rollout of the update of our rapid prototyping framework for developing robot controllers with Simulink.

The main news is that the core of wb-toolbox was split and moved to the new blockfactory repository. The software architecture changed quite a lot. Blockfactory is a new lightweight tool for dataflow programming. Users can use blockfactory to create generic C++ black-box functions that can be loaded in third party tools such as Simulink (and, in this case, exposing them as blocks). In the new architecture, these functions are stored in plugin libraries, which are lazily loaded during runtime when needed.

The nature of wb-toolbox consequently changed. It became a blockfactory plugin what wraps Yarp, iDynTree, Gazebo, and other open source robotic libraries. Wb-toolbox is not anymore related to Simulink. Its black-box functions can be loaded also from plain C++ code.

Despite this big reorganization, we put a lot of effort in maintaining the same user-experience that characterized the previous versions of wb-toolbox. For instance, the workflow for using the blocks to develop controllers (e.g. the ones stored in whole-body-controllers) didn't change.

This released officially adds the support to Simulink Coder, even if this feature is still in tech-preview stage. The blocks created with blockfactory (e.g. the ones stored in wb-toolbox) automatically support Simulink Coder. This means that users can automatically generate C++ code from a Simulink model.

Releases

• blockfactory v0.8
• wb-toolbox v5
• whole-body-controllers v2.0

Note: if you missed it, controllers developed with wb-toolbox v4 can be ported automatically to v5 applying a bash script as reported in robotology/wb-toolbox#167.

Learn more

• blockfactory website
• wb-toolbox website
• blockfactory tutorials