Ros Mutiple Machine

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Problems occur when you have multiple network interfaces on your computers or hostnames are getting confused. To be safe I always set the triple on both master and client computers.

Master (192.168.1.100):

export ROS_MASTER_URI=http://localhost:11311
export ROS_HOSTNAME=192.168.1.100
export ROS_IP=192.168.1.100

Client (192.168.1.101)

export ROS_MASTER_URI=http://192.168.1.100:11311
export ROS_HOSTNAME=192.168.1.101
export ROS_IP=192.168.1.101

I also seem to have trouble with virtualbox nat, but bridged networking works fine. Other sources of information:

• Ros Environment Variables
• Ros Troubleshooting

Also see patrick's link to a similar ros answer.

In addition to the ROS_MASTER_URI environment variable, you may also want to set ROS_HOSTNAME and ROS_IP.

For example:

export ROS_HOSTNAME=192.168.0.21                                                     
export ROS_IP=192.168.0.21                                                           
export ROS_MASTER_URI=http://192.168.0.21:11311

I solved my connectivity issues by playing with the 'rosnode' command. It lets you view and ping the other ros nodes that you may be connected to. In my case, I discovered that one of my nodes wasn't setup right so the connections would get blocked.