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Get information about topic message at runtime

asked 2015-11-18 05:29:27 -0500

ct2034 gravatar image

updated 2015-11-18 05:42:42 -0500

I am trying to build an interface that universally bridges ROS topics to another system. I am importing the message type at runtime:

importcom = (  # import type
    "from " +
    topic_class +
    ".msg import " +
    topic_type
)
exec(importcom, globals())

This allows me to later subscribe to this topic dynamically at runtime.

My question is now: How can I gain insight in the structure of this message at runtime? Ideally I need a json object that includes the types of all the parameters that i expect in a message. e.g.:

{
   "angular" :
      {
           "x": float
           "y": float 
   "linear" :
      {
           "x": float
           "y": float 
....

(or something like this)

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2 Answers

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answered 2015-11-18 08:51:20 -0500

Dimitri Schachmann gravatar image

I don't know about any existing way to get json directly, but the output of rosmsg show should be relatively easy to parse and transform into json. e.g.:

$ rosmsg show sensor_msgs/CameraInfo
Header header
  uint32 seq
  time stamp
  string frame_id
uint32 height
uint32 width
RegionOfInterest roi
  uint32 x_offset
  uint32 y_offset
  uint32 height
  uint32 width
float64[5] D
float64[9] K
float64[9] R
float64[12] P

And if you're into python, you can checkout the implementation of rosmsg here

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Comments

Could you give some hints how to get the API of rosmsg? Because I found the API of rosgraph which can parse the information about which topics the nodes are subscribing from or publishing to. But I didn't find the API to access outputs of "$rosmsg show".

Justin_Qiu gravatar image Justin_Qiu  ( 2018-05-09 09:51:34 -0500 )edit
1

answered 2018-05-14 03:47:40 -0500

Justin_Qiu gravatar image

Here is an API to get rosmsg through python: http://docs.ros.org/kinetic/api/rosms...

After import modules:
import rospy import rosmsg import rospkg I can get the text of messages through rosmsg.list_msgs(ros_pkg) from a certain package, and get all the packages through rospkg.RosPack().list()

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Asked: 2015-11-18 05:29:27 -0500

Seen: 839 times

Last updated: May 14 '18