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Hello,
Could someone explain to me how the rospy.Subscriber('topic', msg, callback) method works. As I noticed we don't need to loop that method to update and check the topic iteratively. It is doing it by itself, and I can't understand how.
The ROS python library runs additional threads to handle message subscription and publishing. So when you call rospy.Subscribe in your code, it doesn't check for incoming messages and execute callbacks itself. It simply adds the topic and function to a list. This list is regularly checked in a different thread which executes the callbacks as needed. This is why you don't need any polling in your code to make the message callbacks work.
Hope this makes sense.
Strictly speaking topics are not updated, because they have no state, they are channels for messages to be passed through. So think of a message being received as opposed to an update. But you are correct, the Subscriber object will make sure the callback is executed when a message is received. You don't need any loops in your code to make this happen, there are loops but they are hidden with rospy so you don't need to worry about them.
Wait, the Python descriptor causes there to be no actual "thread" running in the OS. It just fakes the multi-threading by switching between Python threads. Is it still the same as the subscriber callback function is called whenever rospy thinks it needs to be called?
Asked: 2019-03-20 09:34:44 -0500
Seen: 872 times
Last updated: Mar 20 '19
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