ahans / lcm

Lightweight Communications and Marshalling

Lightweight Communications and Marshalling (LCM)

LCM is a set of libraries and tools for message passing and data marshalling, targeted at real-time systems where high-bandwidth and low latency are critical. It provides a publish/subscribe message passing model and automatic marshalling/unmarshalling code generation with bindings for applications in a variety of programming languages.

Downloads

LCM downloads

Features

• Low-latency inter-process communication
• Efficient broadcast mechanism using UDP Multicast
• Type-safe message marshalling
• User-friendly logging and playback
• No centralized "database" or "hub" -- peers communicate directly
• No daemons
• Few dependencies

Supported platforms / languages

• Platforms:
  • GNU/Linux
  • OS X
  • Windows
  • Any POSIX-1.2001 system (e.g., Cygwin, Solaris, BSD, etc.)
• Languages
  • C
  • C++
  • C#
  • Java
  • Lua
  • MATLAB
  • Python

Documentation

• http://lcm-proj.github.io

Who uses LCM?

LCM was originally developed for the MIT DARPA Urban Challenge team, and has since been used in many robotic and autonomous systems. Its users have included:

• BAE Systems
• Bender Robotics
• Carnegie Mellon University
• ETH Zurich
• Ford Motor Company
• Georgia Tech
• Google
• MIT
• Soar Technology
• University of Michigan
• Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute

If you're using LCM for development or production, we'd love to hear about it. Send an e-mail to [email protected] to let us know.