DORA (Dataflow-Oriented Robotic Architecture) is middleware designed to streamline and simplify the creation of AI-based robotic applications. It offers low latency, composable, and distributed dataflow capabilities. Applications are modeled as directed graphs, also referred to as pipelines.
## Highlights
- 🚀 A single CLI to launch your Python and Rust robotic projects.
- ⚡️ [10-17x faster](https://github.com/dora-rs/dora-benchmark) than `ros2`.
- 🐍 Easy and Fast prototyping with a clean [Python API](https://www.dora-rs.ai/docs/python-api.html).
- 🖥️ Supports macOS, Linux, and Windows.
- ⏬ Installable without Rust via `curl` or `powershell`.
- ❇️ Includes a large set of pre-packaged nodes for fast prototyping.
- 🛠️ Build and Run applications **without compilation step** beyond the native compiler of your favourite language.
- 🤖 Simplifies building robotic applications by integrating hardware, algorithms, and AI models to facilitate seamless communication.
- ⚙️ Eases integration of hardware and software by supporting Python, C, C++, and ROS2, while ensuring low-latency communication with zero-copy Arrow messages.
## Installation
Install dora with our standalone installers, or from [crates.io](https://crates.io/crates/dora-cli):
### On macOS and Linux
```bash
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dora-rs/dora/main/install.sh | bash
```
### On Windows
```powershell
powershell -c "irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dora-rs/dora/main/install.ps1 | iex"
```
### With cargo
```bash
cargo install dora-cli
```
## Documentation
The full documentation is available on [our website](https://www.dora-rs.ai/docs).
A lot of guides are available on [this section](https://dora-rs.ai/docs/guides/) of our website.
## Getting Started
1. Run the benchmark example (Rust must be installed):
```bash
git clone https://github.com/dora-rs/dora
cd dora
cargo run --example benchmark --release
```
2. Run some Python examples (A venv must be activated):
```bash
# activate your venv here
cd dora/examples/python-dataflow
dora up
dora build dataflow.yml
dora start dataflow.yml
```
> Make sure to have a webcam
To stop your dataflow, you can use ctrl+c
## What is Dora? And what features does Dora offer?
**D**ataflow-**O**riented **R**obotic **A**rchitecture (`dora-rs`) is a framework that makes creation of robotic applications fast and simple.
`dora-rs` implements a declarative dataflow paradigm where tasks are split between nodes isolated as individual processes.
Each node defines its inputs and outputs to connect with other nodes.
```yaml
nodes:
- id: camera
path: opencv-video-capture
inputs:
tick: dora/timer/millis/20
outputs:
- image
-
- id: plot
path: opencv-plot
inputs:
image: camera/image
```
The dataflow paradigm has the advantage of creating an abstraction layer that makes robotic applications modular and easily configurable.
---
It offers several features, such as:
### TCP Communication and Shared Memory
Communication between nodes is handled with shared memory on a same machine and TCP on distributed machines. Our shared memory implementation tracks messages across processes and discards them when obsolete. Shared memory slots are cached to avoid new memory allocation.
### Arrow Message Format
Nodes communicate with Apache Arrow Data Format.
[Apache Arrow](https://github.com/apache/arrow-rs) is a universal memory format for flat and hierarchical data. The Arrow memory format supports zero-copy reads for lightning-fast data access without serialization overhead. It defines a C data interface without any build-time or link-time dependency requirement, that means that `dora-rs` has **no compilation step** beyond the native compiler of your favourite language.
### Opentelemetry
dora-rs uses Opentelemetry to record all your logs, metrics and traces. This means that the data and telemetry can be linked using a shared abstraction.
[Opentelemetry](https://opentelemetry.io/) is an open source observability standard that makes dora-rs telemetry collectable by most backends such as elasticsearch, prometheus, Datadog...
Opentelemetry is language independent, backend agnostic, and easily collect distributed data, making it perfect for dora-rs applications.
### Hot-Reloading
dora-rs implements Hot-Reloading for python which means you can change code at runtime in Python while keeping your state intact.
Using the feature flag: `--attach --hot-reload`, dora-rs watch for code change and reload nodes that has been modified.
You can check fail-safe mechanism at: https://github.com/dora-rs/dora/pull/239.
See [this demo](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvvTEP8Jak8).
### ROS2 Bridge
**Note**: this feature is marked as unstable.
- Compilation Free Message passing to ROS 2
- Automatic conversion ROS 2 Message <-> Arrow Array
```python
import pyarrow as pa
# Configuration Boilerplate...
turtle_twist_writer = ...
## Arrow Based ROS2 Twist Message
## which does not require ROS2 import
message = pa.array([{
"linear": {
"x": 1,
},
"angular": {
"z": 1
},
}])
turtle_twist_writer.publish(message)
```
> You might want to use ChatGPT to write the Arrow Formatting: https://chat.openai.com/share/4eec1c6d-dbd2-46dc-b6cd-310d2895ba15
## Showcases
### Self-Coding Robot: Code RAG (WIP)
You can easily create a self-coding robot, by combining Hot-reloading with a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) that is going to generate code modification from your prompt.
See:[examples/python-operator-dataflow](examples/python-operator-dataflow)
Self-Coding Robot is just the tip of the iceberg of robotics combined with llm, that we hope to power. There is so much more that we haven't explored yet like:
- [self-debugging](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.05128.pdf)
- [memory](https://github.com/cpacker/MemGPT)
- [function calling](https://github.com/ShishirPatil/gorilla)
### Cool Hardwares
Cool hardware that we think might be good fit to try out dora-rs 🙋 We are not sponsored by manufacturers:
| | Price | Open Source | Github | type | Dora Project |
| --------------------------------- | ----- | ------------------ | ---------------------------------------------------- | ---------- | ------------------------------------------------------- |
| DJI Robomaster S1 | 550$ | SDK | https://github.com/dji-sdk/RoboMaster-SDK | Rover | https://huggingface.co/datasets/dora-rs/dora-robomaster |
| DJI Robomaster EP Core | 950$ | SDK | https://github.com/dji-sdk/RoboMaster-SDK | Rover, Arm | |
| DJI Tello | 100$ | | | Drone | |
| BitCraze Crazyflies | 225$ | Firmware, Lib, SDK | https://github.com/bitcraze | Drone | |
| AlexanderKoch-Koch/low_cost_robot | 250$ | Everything | https://github.com/AlexanderKoch-Koch/low_cost_robot | Arm | |
| xArm 1S | 200$ | | | Arm | |
| Wavego | 250$ | | | Quadruplet | |
| AINex | 800$ | | | Humanoid | |
> For more: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1YYeW2jfOIWDVgdEgqnMvltonHquQ7K8OZCrnJRELL6o/edit#gid=0
## Support Matrix
| | dora-rs | Hoped for |
| --------------------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **Tier 1 Support** | Python, Rust | C, C++, ROS 2 |
| **Tier 2 Support** | C, C++, ROS2 |
| **Hot-reloading** | Python | Rust (https://github.com/orgs/dora-rs/discussions/360) |
| **Message Format** | Arrow | Native |
| **Local Communication** | Shared Memory | Custom Middleware, [zero-copy GPU IPC](https://arrow.apache.org/docs/python/api/cuda.html), intra-process `tokio::channel` communication |
| **Remote Communication** | TCP | Custom Middleware, [Zenoh](https://zenoh.io/) |
| **Metrics, Tracing, and Logging** | Opentelemetry | Native logging libraries into Opentelemetry |
| **Data archives** | Parquet ([dora-record](libraries/extensions/dora-record)) |
| **Visualization and annotation** | OpenCV | [rerun.io](rerun.io) |
| **Supported Platforms (x86)** | Windows, macOS, Linux |
| **Supported Platforms (ARM)** | macOS, Linux |
| **Configuration** | YAML |
## Contributing
We are passionate about supporting contributors of all levels of experience and would love to see
you get involved in the project. See the
[contributing guide](https://github.com/dora-rs/dora/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md) to get started.
## Discussions
Our main communication channels are:
- [Our Discord server](https://discord.gg/6eMGGutkfE)
- [Our Github Project Discussion](https://github.com/orgs/dora-rs/discussions)
Feel free to reach out on any topic, issues or ideas.
We also have [a contributing guide](CONTRIBUTING.md).
## License
This project is licensed under Apache-2.0. Check out [NOTICE.md](NOTICE.md) for more information.
