phoxal
The Phoxal robot framework as one crate: a coherent, manifest-driven stack for production-oriented autonomous robots — typed bus, simulation-first validation, and a complete platform-runtime contract set, with the same conventions from authoring to deployment.
[]
= "0.4"
Modules
| Module | What it is |
|---|---|
[phoxal::bus] |
Typed Zenoh transport. Bus::{publish, subscriber, request, responder} take a typed Topic<Kind>; the wire body is the contract enum (it carries its own version via the variant), the versionless schema-family identity travels as the Zenoh encoding, and a BusMetadata attachment carries the produce timestamp — so wire mismatches are loud decode errors. |
[phoxal::model] |
Authored manifest schemas: robot.yaml, structure.urdf, component.yaml, simulation.yaml. model::v1::Robot is the resolved superset. |
[phoxal::spatial] |
Geometry, frames, transforms, risk model. |
[phoxal::api] |
The typed bus wire contracts under phoxal::api::<domain> (drive, localize, mission, …, plus component, presence, simulation). Each contract is a domain-first enum (e.g. drive::Target is enum { V1(v1::Target) }, #[serde(tag = "v", content = "data")]); the exact wire structs live under phoxal::api::<domain>::v1. Topics are built with the fluent generated builder phoxal::api::topic, e.g. topic::new().drive().target() → Topic<PubSub<Target>>. Instance ids are method arguments (component("base").motor("left").command()); pass phoxal::bus::topic::ANY for subscribe wildcards (component(ANY).motor(ANY).command()). The leaf return type carries the payload, so the bus rejects a wrong payload at compile time. |
[phoxal::runtime] |
The Runtime trait, execute() bootstrap, logical clock, runtime context, decision logging. |
[phoxal::scenario] |
Webots-backed validation harness (feature scenario). |
Writing a user runtime
Implement the phoxal::runtime::Runtime trait and hand it to execute(); the
contracts you consume/produce come from phoxal::api::*:
async
A runtime reads and writes contracts through the typed Io with fluent topics:
use ;
// subscribe (wildcard ok): map (at_ns, payload) into the runtime's Input.
// The payload is the contract enum — match its current variant:
// match value { drive::Target::V1(target) => Input::Target(target) }
io.subscribe_topic.await?;
// publish: the timestamp is an argument; wrap the payload in the contract enum's
// current variant.
let state = io.publisher_topic.await?;
state.put.await?;
The platform runtime binaries (phoxal-runtime-<name>) ship as container
images, not crates — they depend on this crate but are not published here.
Features
scenario— the Webots validation harness (off by default so production runtime images don't carry test code).
Status
Pre-1.0, building in public. The API is domain-first: phoxal::api::<domain>
exposes a contract enum per wire type, and the enum is the wire body and the
single version authority. A payload revision adds a new variant (V2) — the
serde rename token is the version — while old variants stay so prior recordings
still decode. Breaking changes are loud, not quiet. See
src/api/README.md for the versioning rules.
License
AGPL-3.0-only. A commercial license is available — see the repository.