luckyeights's profile - activity

I've been trying to create a better visualization for our robot using Rviz. I'm working with HERB, which has structure very similar to the pr2, and my goal is to create a new robot model with textures similar to the visualization for pr2.

It looks like the relevant files for the pr2 are in pr2_description, and the main models are collada files. I've been attempting to create similar models using Blender, MeshLab, and ProEngineer, but nothing shows up with color in Rviz.

Many of my problems are very similar to this post, though I'm using Rviz instead of Gazebo. Correct shading isn't necessary - but we need the ability to color an object without having to break it into separate models for Rviz to color independently.

The pr2 model loads just fine. What software was used to create this model? Maybe I can use the same procedure to avoid the picky characteristics of Blender, Collada, and Rviz.

Thank you!

The main overhead is you filling/creating the message + marshalling. If you want to avoid your work: You can check for the getNumSubscribers property in a publisher to prevent doing any work (This is done, for example, in the kinect driver).

Messages should not be stored temporarily unless the topic is latched.

I'm running ROS on a system with low resources.

If I have a publisher streaming messages to a ROS topic (here, a topic which carries sonar readings), but the topic has no listeners, does ROS handle that data? Or is it moved to temporary storage? What extra load, if any, does the publishing of message introduce to the system?