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We just use plain ROS communication. Master runs on robot, operator station connects to robot's master and we just start the necessary GUI nodes. Example screencast of that here. That of course means we stream the full uncompressed nav_msgs/OccupancyGrid message over the wire, which is pretty wasteful.

Using appropriate compression the size of those could be reduced significantly. There is some discussion of this here. The compressed visualization transport for maps can be found here: http://code.google.com/p/rosjava/source/browse/?repo=android&r=5abc45517c0915ca8cf378cba7512dc12016888b#hg%2Fcompressed_visualization_transport

From our testing it turns out that bz2 compression is even better (and more general) than png, so we will likely use that in the future.

Some tools for doing that are available here. I won't be able to give any support in the next 3 weeks though, with VRC and RoboCup coming up :)