joystick control/navigation using python in ros

asked 2013-03-04 16:53:01 -0500

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Hello Hackers,

I'm a beginner in ros. I want to get some data from joystick. I'm a python fan - don't much know the cpp.

I would like to connect my joystick in a usb port, and want to create a node(/package) that gives the datas from joystick ,so that I can directly use it to control my robot.

My Doubts

How I can link the joystick motion control into my robot?
Is it any additional drivers/installation needed to sopport my joystick?
Is it I can able to imperilment it using python?
Is it any additional requirements/specifications needed for the joystick?

answered 2013-03-04 19:39:13 -0500

This post is a wiki. Anyone with karma >75 is welcome to improve it.

That's actually a good demonstration of the advantages of ROS supporting multiple languages. There is a C++ joystick node ready to use that should work with nearly all joysticks/gamepads out of the box: joy.

Provided you have a roscore running, it's very likely that starting

rosrun joy joy_node

in one terminal and running

rostopic echo joy

in another will print out the joystick state. If that's not the case look at the Configuring and Using a Linux-Supported Joystick with ROS tutorial.

Using the joystick data in your python node is just a matter of subscribing to it and performing some processing based on it. A example of doing that is this joy_teleop.py node.

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Is that really working in groovy? "rosdep install joy" does not install anything for me. Otherwise pygame supports juystick and it is easy to write a Python node that uses that.