RAFCON

• Documentation: Hosted on Read the Docs
• Homepage: DLR-RM.github.io/RAFCON/
• License: EPL

Develop your robotic tasks using an intuitive graphical user interface

RAFCON uses hierarchical state machines, featuring concurrent state execution, to represent robot programs. It ships with a graphical user interface supporting the creation of state machines and contains IDE like debugging mechanisms. Alternatively, state machines can programmatically be generated using RAFCON's API.

Universal application

RAFCON is written in Python, can be extended with plugins and is hard- and middleware independent.

Visual programming

The sophisticated graphical editor can be used for the creation, execution and debugging of state machines.

Collaborative working

Share and reuse your state machines in form of libraries, stored as JSON strings in text files.

Installation preparations

Before installing RAFCON, Python 2.7, pip and setuptools are required on your system. Most of the other dependencies are automatically resolved by pip/setuptools, but not all of them. Those need be be installed manually, too:

Installation requirements for Ubuntu 16.04

sudo apt install python-setuptools python-dev
sudo apt install python-opengl python-gtkglext1 python-gtksourceview2

Installation requirements for Ubuntu 18.04

sudo apt-get install python-setuptools python-dev build-essential python-opengl python-gtkglext1 python-gtksourceview2 python-pip
pip2 install --user pylint

General requirements

If you are not using Ubuntu 16.04 or 18.04, please make sure that the following packages are installed:

• Python 2.7
• python-setuptools
• pip
• python-opengl
• python-gtkglext1
• python-gtksourceview2
• pylint

Installing RAFCON (from PyPi)

pip2.7 install rafcon --user

The --user flag is optional. If not set, RAFCON is installed globally.

Download RAFCON sources

cd /install/directory
git clone https://github.com/DLR-RM/RAFCON rafcon

Installing RAFCON (non-editable from source)

If you don't want to edit the source code of RAFCON, it can be installed directly from source:

pip2.7 install /install/directory/rafcon/ --user

Installing RAFCON (editable from source)

If you want to be able to change the source code, you can install RAFCON in editable mode.

pip2.7 install --editable /install/directory/rafcon/ --user

Any changes in /install/directory/rafcon/source will take effect when launching RAFCON.

Start RAFCON

No matter which installation option you choose, RAFCON can be started from any location using (make sure ~/.local/bin is in your PATH environment variable):

rafcon

Building the documentation

The documentation is build with sphinx:

sphinx-build -b html /install/directory/rafcon/doc /install/directory/rafcon/build_doc

This will build the documentation in the /install/directory/rafcon/build_doc folder. Pass -b pdf to generate a PDF instead of a HTML page.

Uninstallation

If you want to uninstall RAFCON, all you need to do is call

pip2.7 uninstall rafcon

Clean RAFCON directory

If you want to clean the RAFCON directory /install/directory/rafcon from any build/installation artifacts, you can do so with:

cd /install/directory/rafcon
rm -r build/ build_doc/ .eggs/ .cache/