Streams

Streams are used to send messages in ERDOS applications.

Operators send and read messages from streams to communicate with other operators and ingest/extract data from the system.

ERDOS streams are similar to ROS topics, but have few additional desirable properties. Streams facilitate one-to-many communication, so only 1 operator sends messages on a stream. ERDOS broadcasts messages sent on a stream to all connected operators. In addition, streams are typed when using the Rust API.

Use the following interfaces to send and receive data from streams: Read Stream, Write Stream, Ingest Stream, and Extract Stream.

Sending Messages

Operators use Write Streams to send data.

Receiving Messages

Operators receive data by registering callbacks or manually reading messages from Read Streams.

Callbacks are functions which take an ERDOS message and any necessary write streams as arguments. Generally, callbacks process received messages and publish the results on write streams.

Ingesting and Extracting Data

Some applications have trouble placing all of the data processing logic inside operators. For these applications, ERDOS provides special stream interfaces to ingest and extract data.

A comprehensive example is available here.

Loops

Certain applications require feedback in the dataflow. To support this use case, ERDOS provides the LoopStream interface to support loops in the dataflow.

A comprehensive example is available here.