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Topics should be used for continuous data streams (sensor data, robot state, ...).
Services should be used for remote procedure calls that terminate quickly, e.g. for querying the state of a node or doing a quick calculation such as IK. They should never be used for longer running processes, in particular processes that might be required to preempt if exceptional situations occur and they should never change or depend on state to avoid unwanted side effects for other nodes.
Actions should be used for everything that moves the robot or that runs for a longer time such as perception routines that are triggered by some node and need a couple of seconds to terminate. The most important property of actions is that they can be preempted and the preemption should always be implemented cleanly by action servers. Another nice property of actions is that they can keep state for the lifetime of a goal, i.e. if executing two action goals in parallel on the same server, for each client a separate state instance can be kept since the goal is uniquely identified by its id.
| | 2 | No.2 Revision |
Topics should be used for continuous data streams (sensor data, robot state, ...).
Services should be used for remote procedure calls that terminate quickly, e.g. for querying the state of a node or doing a quick calculation such as IK. They should never be used for longer running processes, in particular processes that might be required to preempt if exceptional situations occur and they should never change or depend on state to avoid unwanted side effects for other nodes.
Actions should be used for everything that moves the robot or that runs for a longer time such as perception routines that are triggered by some node and need a couple of seconds to terminate. The most important property of actions is that they can be preempted and the preemption should always be implemented cleanly by action servers. Another nice property of actions is that they can keep state for the lifetime of a goal, i.e. if executing two action goals in parallel on the same server, for each client a separate state instance can be kept since the goal is uniquely identified by its id.
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