Ach Inter-Process Communications (IPC)

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Ach is a new Inter-Process Communication (IPC) mechanism and library. It is uniquely suited for coordinating perception, control drivers, and algorithms in real-time systems that sample data from physical processes. Ach eliminates the Head-of-Line Blocking problem for applications that always require access to the newest message. Ach is efficient, robust, and formally verified. It has been tested and demonstrated on a variety of physical robotic systems. Finally, the source code for Ach is available under an Open Source BSD-style license.

Download Source Code

Tarball Download: Source code, example program, benchmarks, SPIN Model
git clone https://github.com/golems/ach

Install Debian Packages

Packages for i386 and amd64, Debian proper and Ubuntu

Add this line to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://code.golems.org/debian squeeze golems.org

(Replace "squeeze" with the codename for your distribution, ie "sid", "lucid", "precise", etc.)
# apt-get update
# apt-get install ach-utils libach-dev

Documentation

Mailing Lists

ach-announce: Low traffic announcements list for new releases, etc. (subscribe)
ach-help: Help, Questions, and Support (subscribe)
ach-devel: Development discussions (subscribe)

Publications

Conference

2012
Neil T. Dantam and Mike Stilman Robust and Efficient Communication for Real-Time Multi-Process Robot Software International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids). 2012.
Abstract BibTeX PDF

We present a new Interprocess Communication (IPC) mechanism and library. Ach is uniquely suited for coordinating drivers, controllers, and algorithms in complex robotic systems such as humanoid robots. Ach eliminates the Head-of-Line Blocking problem for applications that always require access to the newest message. Ach is efficient, robust, and formally verified. It has been tested and demonstrated on a variety of physical robotic systems, and we discuss the implementation on our humanoid robot Golem Krang. Finally, the source code for Ach is available under an Open Source permissive license.
```
@inproceedings{dantam2012robust,
  title = {Robust and Efficient Communication for Real-Time Multi-Process Robot Software},
  booktitle = {International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids)},
  author = {Neil T. Dantam and Mike Stilman},
  year = {2012}
}
```