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What are practices for deploying robot-specific packages?

asked 2016-03-07 09:31:07 -0500

QAston gravatar image

Tutorials on the wiki demonstrate how to create and work with packages within a catkin_workspace, but they don't show how to deploy the resulting robot-specific packages for the target robot.

As far as I understand the official guide for deployment is this bloom tutorial. It results in a .deb package ready for install on target machine. The guide however results in publishing the package on official ROS sites. I don't have a problem with that, but I don't think that's a correct way of deployment of robot-specific packages which contain code like button handlers, movement routines and stuff. I think releasing such modules this way would pollute package with useless crap. Am I right about this, or maybe I'm doing the packages wrong by creating packages specific to my usecase?

It looks like deployment should be done by recreating the catkin workspace on the target system. The workspace should contain a package which depends on packages neccesary to run the robot and have a roslaunch file which starts all the neccesary nodes. Are there ways to make that easier by packaging the workspace? Or maybe there are other ways to do this?

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answered 2016-03-07 11:33:01 -0500

dornhege gravatar image

It depends what a robot-specific package is for you. If that is just the packages necessary for running a specific type of robot, go ahead and release them as .deb. Everyone can use these.

If they are just for one specific robot or setup that you have, this is probably not necessary. In that case, yes, just recreate the catkin workspace as you would also do for algorithms. Packaging-wise: If you need to rebuilt the code on the target system, you can just make a rosinstall file of your packages and then setting up a catkin workspace should be easy. If you have the exact same setup, you could also just use the install space and copy that to the robot.

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Asked: 2016-03-07 09:31:07 -0500

Seen: 321 times

Last updated: Mar 07 '16