telekyb3 is part of the more general OpenRobots software collection. You can browse the OpenRobots projects on https://git.openrobots.org/projects for more information.

The software is provided as a collection of small, individual packages that work together rather than as a single, monolithic application. This makes the framework really modular, at the cost of a setup probably more involved.

There is no strict definiton of what software is part of telekyb3, but anything closely related to aerial robots like flight controller, trajectory planner or specific hardware drivers will typically be considered part of it. Check the available subprojects at https://git.openrobots.org/projects/telekyb3 for an up-to-date list. Notable components are the core components able to fly a robot:

On the other hand, generic robotic software like state estimation, localization, map building or standard actuator support will rather be considered part of Openrobots. For instance:

telekyb3 makes heavy use of the GenoM tool for creating a modular, component-based software architecture. GenoM is a software component generator that can target different middlewares (such as ROS, YARP) so that the components source code remains independant of the middleware. This provides a great source code reusability and abstracts the developers from any concern regarding the choice of a middleware. You can find more detail on the project page at https://git.openrobots.org/projects/genom3.

Although any GenoM-enabled middleware can be used for running the telekyb3 components, in particular ROS, it is suggested that the pocolibs (see https://git.openrobots.org/projects/pocolibs) middleware is used when possible. Many of the components provided by telekyb3 publish and read data at a relatively high frequency and pocolibs it is much more performant and fast compared to ROS in this scenario. pocolibs also has real-time guarantees which can be beneficial to the high-frequency controllers components.

All the available software is distributed in source or binary form via robotpkg. This is a compilation framework and packaging system for installing software developed by the robotics research community. It also contains packages for some general, third-party open-source software that the robotics software depends on and that is not commonly packaged by major unix distributions. It is highly recommended that you download and install telekyb with robotpkg, since this provides automatic dependencies management and easy upgrade paths. Generic information on setup and usage can be found at https://git.openrobots.org/projects/robotpkg. You can of course still choose to manually install some or all the software, especially if you intend to develop and extend the software itself.

The following sections provides detailed instruction on how to install and setup telekyb3 software according to your needs.