Rock offers both a rich development environment and a collection of ready-to-use packages. This documentation pages describe the development environment as well as some important “core” libraries.

Development Workflow

First and foremost, development in Rock always starts with creating a library. As a guideline, this library has to be independent of Rock’s component-based integration framework. That’s right, even if you don’t use Rock’s tooling, feel free to use its drivers and algorithms Then, this library gets integrated in oroGen, Rock’s component-oriented integration framework.

For runtime, network of Rock components are often setup and managed using the Ruby programming language. Bindings to Ruby allow to start processes, start and stop components, connect them together and bind them to user interfaces in a very flexible way.

Tutorials will guide you through getting to grips with the process, from a library to running network of components.

Data Analysis

At this point, Rock offers extended support for runtime as well as offline data analysis. Logging is an integral part of the development workflow: it can be used for post-mortem analysis as well as to test components through log replay mechanisms. Then, Vizkit kicks in. is both an oroGen-independent library of Qt-based widgets and OpenSceneGraph-based 3D visualizers, and a Ruby library that allows to seamlessly display both logged and live data. Extending it with new widgets and visualizers is straightforward.

Advanced System Management

Finally, Rock gives you rock-roby, a model-based system management layer which will allow you to manage complex networks of components both at design and running time. Have a look first at the corresponding tutorials.