Attention: Answers.ros.org is deprecated as of August the 11th, 2023. Please visit robotics.stackexchange.com to ask a new question. This site will remain online in read-only mode during the transition and into the foreseeable future. Selected questions and answers have been migrated, and redirects have been put in place to direct users to the corresponding questions on Robotics Stack Exchange. Additional details are available here.

Revision history [back]

The recommended practice is to write your library in a ROS independent manner (e.g. using a std::map in the API). Then you wrap that library in a thin layer which will map your API into ROS messages (doing the shuffling of the data from the map to the message and back).

ROS message do not support dictionaries / maps as a built in type which would make your mapping easier.

ROS Answers is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 license.