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roslaunch for multi-robot team

asked 2011-11-07 16:20:27 -0600

Tom Sgouros gravatar image

Hello all:

I want to write a roslaunch file to launch the same set of nodes, identically configured, on a number of robots. What's the most economical way to write a launch file or files to do that? The requirements are:

  • There are about 20 parameters to configure each node. I want to set the parameters in only one place, so I don't want these to be renamed/remapped.
  • Each robot runs six nodes that publish four topics and provide one service. These were not written with multiple robots in mind, so they must each be renamed, e.g. from "/cmd_vel" to "/machine1/cmd_vel."

In this case "economical" means not only short, but requiring the least work to add and subtract robots from the ensemble. I thought of writing a launch file for a single robot and then including it multiple times in a master file:

<group ns="machine1"> <include file="individual.launch"/> </group>

Wouldn't that change the parameter names along with the topic and service names? It also seems a little clunky. Is there a better way?

Bonus question: I wish I knew an easy way to supply each robot with a list of all the others in the launch file, or even just a list of all the robots on the team.

Thank you.

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answered 2011-11-08 00:36:33 -0600

DimitriProsser gravatar image

Take a look here, here, and here. The third link is probably the most relevant. Take a look at section 1.3. These pages talk about running ROS across multiple machines. The nodes to run on any machine will be configured with the <machine> tag.

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Just a word of caution: Don't do this over an unreliable (e.g. wireless) connection. Check http://ros.org/wiki/rocon_multimaster for something to do actual distributed ROS.

Max Pfingsthorn gravatar image Max Pfingsthorn  ( 2013-07-24 04:51:17 -0600 )edit

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Asked: 2011-11-07 16:20:27 -0600

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Last updated: Nov 08 '11