A Build System for Software Development in Robotic Academic Collaborative Environments

The software development cycle in the robotic research environment is hectic and heavily driven by project or paper deadlines. Developers have only little time available for packaging the C/C++ code they write, develop and maintain the build system and continuous integration tools. Research projects are joint efforts of different groups working remotely and asynchronously. The typical solution is to rely on binary distributions and/or large repositories that compile all software and dependencies. This approach hinders code sharing and reuse and often leads to repositories whose inter-dependencies are difficult to manage. Following many years of experience leading software integration in research projects, we developed YCM, a tool that supports our best practices addressing these issues. YCM is a set of CMake scripts that provides (1) build system support: to develop and package software libraries and components, and (2) superbuild deployment: to prepare and distribute sets of packages in source form as a single meta build. In this paper, we describe YCM and report on our experience adopting it as a tool for managing software repositories in large research projects.