Revision history [back]

This is probably not the answer you're looking for, but in ROS 2 (think long term), it's very likely that nodes will have an (optional) standard lifecycle. See the proposed node lifecycle design document for more details. I believe the proposal addresses what you're asking for.

For ROS 1, i.e. now, there is no general out-of-the-box solution that I know of. I know some projects like ros_control implement project-specific solutions. You might want to implement a custom solution.