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What are the main differences between rosrt and realtime_tools?

In ROS we can find two different packages to use publishers and subscribers in real-time:

The capacities of both packages look overlapped. Is any of them obsolete? Are they being developed by different research groups? realtime_tools looks more updated, however it does not provide a realtime subscriber. What are the main differences? What are the future guidelines of each project?

Asked by Pablo Iñigo Blasco on 2013-12-17 00:24:00 UTC

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They indeed complement and overlap each other. realtime_tools is part of ros_control and used/maintained. I don't know about the status of ros_realtime, but at least it has functionality that is currently lacking in realtime_tools. I wondered the same thing as you some months ago, but did not have the resources to get it done.

Asked by Adolfo Rodriguez T on 2013-12-17 10:42:02 UTC

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But I do not understand why ros_control package (that is a quite new package) contains functionality that existed previously. It should exist some reason. I don't know, for instance, does the realtime_tools::RealTimePublisher provide any advantaje over the rosrt::Publisher?

Asked by Pablo Iñigo Blasco on 2013-12-26 23:09:33 UTC

Both packages existed pre-ros_control. One was included in ros_control and updated as it provided some baseline functionality. The effort to do the same for ros_realtime and unify implementations has not yet been done.

Asked by Adolfo Rodriguez T on 2013-12-30 11:32:59 UTC