Running several nodes under a "top" node

asked 2011-05-11 19:11:21 -0600

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updated 2014-01-28 17:09:40 -0600

ngrennan
1 ●1 ●1

I have organized my code in such a way that when I run a "main" file, it calls methods in other classes, from other packages, to accomplish a task. I soon realized that the classes written, requires a rospy node so that it can communicate with ROS_MASTER. But I cannot initialize other nodes under the "main" node as i think ROS only allows one node to be initialized and not a node inside another.

Example: The classes in the other packages use SimpleActionClient/action client which uses the actionlib, that requires to initialize a node to publish messages and call services. I had only initialized a node for the "main" method. And since I cannot initialize any more nodes, the code does not really do anything

Any advice on how to resolve this issue? or any alternative ideas?

Thanks!

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Can you update your question to clarify what you're trying to do, and what isn't working? Possibly provide an example. From your description everything sounds doable.

tfoote ( 2011-05-11 19:59:42 -0600 )edit

Sorry about that!, hope this edit makes sense..

Nash ( 2011-05-12 11:37:51 -0600 )edit

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answered 2011-05-11 21:35:08 -0600

Felix Endres

6468 ●28 ●57 ●93 http://www.informatik....

From what I understand you want several classes of your program to use ros-node functionality. You can just pass them the node handle in their constructor and store it in a member variable. See here for such a constructor definition.

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Thank You!..it works like a charm!

Nash ( 2011-05-12 19:32:44 -0600 )edit

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answered 2011-05-12 15:50:34 -0600

tfoote

58457 ●128 ●550 ●526 http://www.ros.org/

I'm assuming your using c++.

You can create as many NodeHandles as you want in your code. You only need to call ros::init at the top of your main. Everything else can just create a ros::NodeHandle using any valid constructor.

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Actually, Im using Python, according to http://www.ros.org/wiki/rospy/Overview/Initialization%20and%20Shutdown, it mentions that "You can only have one node in a rospy process, so you can only call rospy.init_node() once" But I got it to work by passing it down to the constructor, like you said.

Nash ( 2011-05-12 19:35:01 -0600 )edit

Are you saying, when I create two node handles in the same executable, they both refer to the same node?