What is an effective way to find documentation for ROS packages?

asked 2019-11-10 20:44:28 -0500

pauljurczak gravatar image

I just started to work with ROS and I'm not sure if my problem to find documentation of certain ROS packages is caused by my search strategy or absence of such documentation. For example, there is trajectory-tracker package, which was released with several ROS versions. Going to ROS Wiki and searching for trajectory-tracker returns some ads, several mentions of ros-<release name>-trajectory-tracker in new release posts and a useless link to joint_trajectory_controller. Regular Google search doesn't fare much better.

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Just a comment on the wiki here: _ in ROS package names are converted into - in Debian/Ubuntu package names. So reversing this, trajectory-tracker would become trajectory_tracker. Realising that packages that would have a wiki page would have that page located at wiki.ros.org/$package_name, we'd get: wiki.ros.org/trajectory_tracker. This page exists, although it would appear the authors haven't spent too much time putting any content there (at this point it seems to be a stub).

It does tell us the package is part of a set of packages called neonavigation, and that the main repository may be found at at-wat/neonavigation. The readme of that repository does seem to contain a bit more information.

gvdhoorn gravatar image gvdhoorn  ( 2019-11-11 01:36:11 -0500 )edit

re: trajectory_tracker: this name is not a really good name imo. In the context of REP 144 it would seem to be a little too generic (what sort of trajectories? For what type of robots? How are the 'tracked' exactly? Etc).

This is not directed at you of course.

gvdhoorn gravatar image gvdhoorn  ( 2019-11-11 01:38:02 -0500 )edit

@gvdhoom - -> _: thank you for the tip!

pauljurczak gravatar image pauljurczak  ( 2019-11-11 01:50:54 -0500 )edit
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