Basic Usage

To get familiar with AIRA, let’s see what is under the hood.

Once you launch the client several ros nodes will already be on the run. Here’s a list of robonomics communication stack nodes:

$ rosnode list
/eth/erc20_token
/eth/eth_node
/graph/aira_graph
/liability/executor
/liability/infochan/eth/signer
/liability/infochan/ipfs_channel
/liability/persistence
/liability/listener
/rosout
  • /eth/erc20_token, /eth/eth_node - proved services for Ethereum blockchain and ERC20 tokens
  • /graph/aira_graph - service node for exploring other AIRA instances
  • /liability/executor - gets rosbag file from IPFS and plays it
  • /liability/infochan/ipfs_channel - is responsible for offer, demand and result messages. It catches messages from the channel and sends signed messages back
  • /liability/infochan/eth/signer - offers services for signing offer, demand and result messages
  • /liability/listener - watches for a new liability contracts. When the event is received the node calls executor node
  • /liability/persistence - helps to store incoming liabilities and restart them after shutdown

And here’s a list of robonomics stack topics.

$ rostopic list
/eth/event/approval
/eth/event/transfer
/graph/greetings
/liability/complete
/liability/finalized
/liability/incoming
/liability/infochan/eth/sending/demand
/liability/infochan/eth/sending/offer
/liability/infochan/eth/sending/result
/liability/infochan/eth/signing/demand
/liability/infochan/eth/signing/offer
/liability/infochan/eth/signing/result
/liability/infochan/incoming/demand
/liability/infochan/incoming/offer
/liability/infochan/incoming/result
/liability/persistence/add
/liability/persistence/del
/liability/persistence/update_timestamp
/liability/ready
/liability/result
/rosout
/rosout_agg

The most important topics for us are:

  • /liability/incoming - when a new liability is created, this topic publishes Ethereum address of the contract
  • /liability/result - this topic is for publishing results. But don’t publish a result directly to this topic! Use a service instead
  • /liability/infochan/incoming/* - a CPS gets information about offer, demand or result from corresponding topics
  • /liability/infochan/eth/signing/* - a CPS sends offer, demand or result messages to corresponding topics

For the details check out the API page.

Let’s start with greetings - say hello to AIRA!

You should just launch a pre-installed package hello_aira:

$ rosrun hello_aira hello_aira

We’ve launched our agent. It will wait for a demand message. Now it’s time to send the message. Go to dapp and press Order. Now go back to the console and see the result!