Current role nodelets in the ROS ecosystem
I also posted a more technical code-related question about nodelets, but I felt this was a separate question.
As somebody who is used to designing image processing pipelines, nodelets make a lot of sense to me. I have made efforts to minimize the number of data copies across a PCI bus (CPU <--> GPU), so the overhead of copying data between processes through the IP stack seems like a much larger concern.
However, I'm confused as to why the image_transport package does not seem to include any tutorials for using nodelets. Also, the uvc_camera doesn't come with a nodelet version of the driver (althought the 1394 camera does).
So are nodelets not well supported at this time? Or am I looking in all of the wrong places for documentation/examples?
Additional comment: comms through
localhost
are very efficient under Linux, so even though it will be more of a performance hit than using nodelets+zero-copy, it's nowhere near as bad as you might think.