What to do when driver has no diagnostics output ?

Hello everyone,

I use diagnostics in my robot to detect failures and it ś extremely important for us. The problem is that some drivers don't output diagnostics or output imperfect diagnostic data.

For example :

Our radar don't output any diagnostics.
Our GPS always output warning because of a bug.

How would you solve these problems ?

I was thinking about subscribing to the radar and GPS topics and generating diagnostics messages myself. It should work but is it fundamentally wrong to do this ?

How would you do it ?

Thanks a lot !

Asked by Mackou on 2020-09-15 07:16:42 UTC

Comments

Answers

I would create a fork of the driver and add in the diagnostic publishing myself. Additionally, you could push your changes back to the original driver with a Pull Request. The vast majority of nodes available for ROS are open-source which means they are not static and un-changing but are constantly developed by the community. I'm sure that most driver developers who don't produce diagnostic messages would be open to having someone add them.

Asked by Josh Whitley on 2020-09-15 22:41:08 UTC