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 thing I was missing was that it is necessary to init the node in order to access private params. eg.

#!/usr/bin/env python
import rospy
rospy.init_node("some_name")
foo = rospy.get_param("~foo")
print str(foo)

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.