Concepts

An RtBot program expects a signal as input, which is a time-ordered stream of messages to be fed to it, one at the time, in what we call a program iteration. This iteration may or may not produce an output, which will be defined later.

A message is a tuple of timestamp and value. It is important to remark, even if obvious, that the timestamp in the message is the one used for any internal analysis, and not the time that the message arrives. RtBot has no clock inside or anything similar, so it has no way of counting real life time.

RtBot assumes the time inside a message to be an integer. The main motivation for this is that comparing two timestamps is more efficient and meaningful in this case than if we allow the timestamps to be of float type. This allows, for instance, to synchronize signals according to its timestamp in a much simplified and efficient way. This shall not, however, be a hurdle to adopt RtBot to process signals with fractionary timestamps, as a rescaling in the time dimension of the signal prior to sending it to the RtBot program will solve any type mismatch. This time scale, i.e. seconds or milliseconds, depends on the nature of the signal being processed and it is up to the programmer to decide which makes sense for the given type of signal.