AsyncIO-based library for communication with Adept robot controllers.

The library supports creation of high-level robot control nodes and their integration into distributed publish-subscribe systems based on ZeroMQ. The AsyncIO backend allows for flexible composition of multiple communication-heavy coroutines to form a single robot control node.

Robot applications written with pyadept interact with a robot based on the Adept V+ platform running the code from AdeptServer.

The intended workflow is based on treating the robot controller as a service. The first stage is to enable high power for the robot and start the AdeptServer's server V+ program on the robot controller side. After this, a Python program based on pyadept can be launched and used for high-level system coordination.

Robot commands are defined as classes in the pyadept.rcommands module. They construct immutable instances providing the functionality of correct generation of the corresponding messages via the the get_messages method. It returns a tuple of byte strings, each finalized with the delimiter sequence "\r\n".

The pyadept.rprotocol module consists of classes, functions and coroutines realizing the communication logic of a pyadept-baseds program, as well as tools for data capture during system operation.

pyadept.rprotocol.RobotClient provides coroutine methods connect (establishing the connection with the server), as well as cmdexec and cmdexec_joined (providing execution of commands). The two latter methods accept one on more instances of robot commands and initiate communication with the V+ server using AsyncIO's StreamWriter/StreamReader pair. Several commands supplied to cmdexec are handled one-by-one: each command's messages are sent to the server, and the corresponding responses are awaited before proceeding to the next command. Conversely, cmdexec_joined combines messages from the supplied commands into a single sequence, and sends all of them in one run.

pyadept.rprotocol.ProtobufCommunicator uses AsyncIO-compatible ZeroMQ primitives to announce a Protobuf-based request event and wait for the corresponding Protobuf-based response in the context of a publish/subscribe system.

Please refer to the following research paper for more information about pyadept and AdeptServer:

• Semeniuta, O. and Falkman, P. (2019) ‘Event-driven industrial robot control architecture for the Adept V+ platform’, PeerJ Computer Science, 5, e207. doi: 10.7717/peerj-cs.207.