Configure an application to launch at start-up#

Pre-requisites#

Adding your own application to the robot’s start-up sequence#

In addition to the system applications, you can easily add your own custom start-up configuration files to start your own applications.

To do so, the startup manager looks for configuration files inside /home/pal/.pal/pal_startup/.

To modify the robot’s startup, this directory must be created and have the same structure as the config directory within the pal_startup_base package, specifically, having the apps/ and control/ subdirectories.

For example, to start customizing the start-up:

ssh pal@ari-0c

cd /home/pal/.pal/
mkdir -p pal_startup/apps
mkdir -p pal_startup/control

To add a new application my_app to the startup, create a my_app.yaml file within the apps directory, and populate it with the information described in Application files.

That files defines how to start the application.

For instance:

/home/pal/.pal/pal_startup/apps/my_app.yaml

roslaunch: "my_app_package my_app.launch"
dependencies: []

Then, in order to launch the application on the main control computer, create a new start-up list inside the control/ directory: a simple yaml file that references my_app.yaml:

/home/pal/.pal/pal_startup/control/my_app_list.yaml

- my_app

Reboot the robot. Your app should now be automatically started.

You can also start, stop, restart or visualize the logs of your application with the command-line tools:

ssh pal@ari-0c

pal-stop my_app
pal-start my_app
pal-restart my_app
pal-log my_app

See also#