Reference and Installation (Python)

💡 Recommendation: Quick Start If you want to get started with AimRT development quickly, we strongly recommend using the Development Container, which provides a pre-configured complete development environment.

The AimRT Python interface is used through the aimrt_py package. You can obtain the aimrt_py package in three ways:

  • 【Not yet supported】PyPI installation;

  • Binary installation;

  • Source compilation installation;

Python Environment Requirements

The lowest Python version officially tested by AimRT is 3.10, and the minimum glibc version on Linux systems is 2.28 (you can check this with the ldd --version command).

We have tested the aimrt_py package on the following systems and Python versions:

  • Ubuntu 22.04

    • python 3.10

  • Windows 10

    • python 3.11

AimRT-Python also supports all AimRT plugins and Protobuf, ROS2 message types. Its configuration files are almost identical to AimRT-Cpp, except that pkg-related configurations are not needed in Python, and the rest of the configuration files can be reused; its interface functionality is also basically identical to AimRT-Cpp, but the RPC interface only has a synchronous interface, with no asynchronous/coroutine RPC interfaces.

PyPI Installation

TODO

Binary Installation

You can find the aimrt_py whl file directly on AimRT’s release page and install it via pip.

Source Compilation Installation

First, download the source code via git or other methods, then refer to Ubuntu Source Build/ Windows Source Build for building and compilation. After the build is complete, the aimrt_py whl file will be located in the build/aimrt_py_pkg/dist path, and can then be installed via pip.

Plugin Installation Instructions

AimRT adopts a plugin-based design, where different plugins correspond to different functionalities. Plugins are dynamically loaded at runtime and are essentially dynamic library files. Due to some dependency-related reasons, certain plugins may need to be installed separately.

After installation, you can view the installed plugins as follows:

ls -l $(pip show aimrt_py | grep Location | awk '{print $2 "/aimrt_py"}')

This command will display all files in the installation path, where files with plugin as the filename suffix are plugin files (on Linux they are *_plugin.so, on Windows they are *_plugin.dll).

The Windows platform does not currently support plugins like ros2, mqtt, opentelemetry, etc.