apollo_windows

Windows minimal portation (MinGW + CMake) of Baidu's Apollo autonomous driving platform

Motivations

The Baidu's Apollo is a very famous platform for autonomous driving. I have studied its source code and I think the framework is well designed!

Why port it to Windows?

The original version of Apollo only supports the Linux system. But most people use Windows computer on their daily basis. For me, I am not willing to install another os on my desktop in order to study and test the Apollo source code

Why not fork from original repo?

When I downloaded from the original repo in Feb 2020, I was shocked by size: oh dear, 1.3GB! I don't need the whole bunch of files in order to study its architecture. It makes people inconvenient to download and study it. Therefore, I have cut unimportant features and only left the core cyber framework. The compiled dll only takes about 10MB.

Why not use Bazel for the build system?

I am not a fan of Java and I don't really want to install a Java runtime on my machine. CMake is commonly used for C++ project. All of its dependencies support cmake as well.

Progress

Currently I have successfully compiled the core lib libcyber.dll as and have the talker and listener example programs to run. It works on Linux as well. I have commented out some Linux specific code to make the windows version compile. There is still some further work.

Windows environment

• MSYS2
• MinGW64
• CMake
• C++17

Dependencies

find_package(glog REQUIRED)
find_package(gflags REQUIRED)
find_package(gtest REQUIRED)

find_package(Protobuf REQUIRED)
find_package(fastcdr REQUIRED)
find_package(fastrtps REQUIRED)
find_package(Poco REQUIRED Foundation)

Install Dependencies

Fast-RTPS

• Use my MinGW version(v1.5.0 branch) https://github.com/mjopenglsdl/Fast-RTPS/tree/v1.5.0-msys2-mingw
• Use my modified version(v1.5.0 branch, solved std::string serialize problem) https://github.com/mjopenglsdl/Fast-CDR/tree/compatible-fastrtps-v1.5.0

How to run it?

Under the build directory, you will find a folder called bin, all generated lib and executable will be saved here.

Log

Log will be saved on the same dir as the exe file, it is named with current running executable name, like "talker.exe.log.INFO.20200224-150237.7724"

Configurations

Add environment variable CYBER_PATH to .bachrc.

export CYBER_PATH=~/git_repo/apollo_windows

Working examples

The examples are located at src/examples folder. Two working examples are ready to be built and run. Talker is the node that send message:

#include "cyber/cyber.h"
#include "examples/proto/examples.pb.h"
#include "cyber/time/rate.h"
#include "cyber/time/time.h"

using apollo::cyber::Rate;
using apollo::cyber::Time;
using apollo::cyber::examples::proto::Chatter;

int main(int argc, char *argv[]) 
{
  // init cyber framework
  apollo::cyber::Init(argv[0]);

  // create talker node
  auto talker_node = apollo::cyber::CreateNode("talker");
  // create talker
  auto talker = talker_node->CreateWriter<Chatter>("channel/chatter");
  Rate rate(1.0);

  while (apollo::cyber::OK()) {
    static uint64_t seq = 0;
    auto msg = std::make_shared<Chatter>();
    msg->set_timestamp(Time::Now().ToNanosecond());
    msg->set_lidar_timestamp(Time::Now().ToNanosecond());
    msg->set_seq(seq++);
    msg->set_content("Hello, apollo!");
    talker->Write(msg);
    AINFO << "talker sent a message!";
    rate.Sleep();
  }
  return 0;
}

The Listener receives message:

#include "cyber/cyber.h"
#include "examples/proto/examples.pb.h"

void MessageCallback(
    const std::shared_ptr<apollo::cyber::examples::proto::Chatter>& msg) {
  AINFO << "Received message seq-> " << msg->seq();
  AINFO << "msgcontent->" << msg->content();
}

int main(int argc, char* argv[]) 
{
  // init cyber framework
  apollo::cyber::Init(argv[0]);

  // create listener node
  auto listener_node = apollo::cyber::CreateNode("listener");
  
  // create listener
  auto listener =
      listener_node->CreateReader<apollo::cyber::examples::proto::Chatter>(
          "channel/chatter", MessageCallback);
  apollo::cyber::WaitForShutdown();
  return 0;
}

Copyright

• The license belongs to the original Apollo Team https://github.com/ApolloAuto/apollo

Windows portation

• Minjie https://github.com/mjopenglsdl
• Contributors are welcome !