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Hello, sounds a funny idea.

You can use the app_manager to start/stop/lists apps in the robot. Assuming you launched turtlebot_bringup minimal.launch, you can list the available apps with:

rosservice call /turtlebot/list_apps | grep -v data

(the grep is to avoid get spammed with icons binary data)

To start/stop follower:

rosservice call /turtlebot/start_app "name: 'turtlebot_core_apps/follower'"
rosservice call /turtlebot/stop_app "name: 'turtlebot_core_apps/follower'"

Note that start the app takes some time, as it launches opennni driver and some other stuff. Once started, following behavior can be activated/deactivated with:

rosservice call /turtlebot_follower/change_state "state: 1"
rosservice call /turtlebot_follower/change_state "state: 0"

This is much faster and less error prone that start/stop the app. Btw, you can also call services with the service client API.