Why AutoAPMS?

As you might already know, designing a robotic real-time system and enabling it to manipulate or move around its environment is a painfully time consuming task and requires a lot of practical experience. Shortly after you started prototyping, you'll probably realize that a big portion of what you do isn't actually related to your application. Especially when it becomes more complex, there are a lot of "side quests" which revolve around structuring functionality, maintaining modularity and most importantly defining operational fallback mechanisms if something goes wrong.

"If only there was another one of those helpful ROS 2 packages to provide me with a framework to deal with all that", you might think. 🤔

Enter AutoAPMS: A ROS 2 project that offers a unified toolset and a flexible system architecture designed for helping you focus on the most important development tasks. It provides an end-to-end solution for designing and executing robotic applications.

Use Case

AutoAPMS's modular design allows software components to be reused effectively and introduces powerful concepts for creating behaviors from a high level of abstraction. This software adds a top-level deliberation layer to existing mission control solutions provided by Nav2 or PX4. These kinds of software stacks commonly provide functionality on the execution level. AutoAPMS, however, is designed to orchestrate the underlying processes from the management level, effectively increasing the intelligence of an autonomous system and therefore it's capability to operate resiliently.

However, we do not offer a full-fledged planning system like AIPlan4EU and PlanSys2 for example. Instead, we mostly provide user-oriented development tools which facilitate implementing the underlying actions/tasks and manually composing them to achieve intermediate objectives. One use case would be to assemble individual procedures using AutoAPMS and then formulate a mission plan employing a domain-specific algorithm provided by other projects. It's up to the user to define the degree of complexity for procedures implemented with AutoAPMS. If your use case is rather simple or you prefer a more comprehensible way of planning a mission, we additionally offer functionality that allows to manually configure behaviors to represent bigger missions. Refer to the page about AutoAPMS's Mission Architecture for more info.

INFO

The long-term goal is to eventually be able to incorporate existing planning libraries when applying our mission architecture. We want robots to master arbitrary complex problems while being able to dynamically react to contingencies/emergencies in a sensible way.

Features

AutoAPMS provides developers of real-time systems with the following key features:

• Convenient resource management integrating deeply with CMake
• Modular, plugin-based approach for implementing robotic skills/tasks
• User-friendly behavior design adopting the behavior tree paradigm
• Flexible, highly configurable behavior executor
• Powerful C++ behavior tree builder API
• Straightforward contingency and emergency management concept
• Standardized interfaces and command line tools for running and orchestrating the operation

These features frame a unified toolset for implementing behavior-based systems and make it significantly more user-friendly and less error prone to design and execute robotic applications.

What makes it special?

This project combines the concepts introduced by multiple other repositories. From all related projects, BehaviorTree.CPP is by far the most prominent one. This repo provides the core implementation of the behavior tree paradigm. However, when using it standalone, the application specific integration into the workspace is still up to the user. With AutoAPMS, all supported applications are building on ROS 2 which allows extending the behavior tree API to integrate well with ament_cmake and ROS's plugin system.

Behavior trees have also been adopted for creating robotic applications by Nav2 Behavior Tree. Compared to the nav2_behavior_tree package, AutoAPMS thinks behavior trees further. The entire project is dedicated to simplify behavior development and automates/standardizes most of the troublesome and error-prone manual development work.

TIP

You may also include both Nav2's and AutoAPMS's packages in your workspace. In fact, Nav2 has plenty of useful features that AutoAPMS doesn't offer (the same goes for the other way around). It's important to understand that these two frameworks don't oppose but complement each other.