Hi All,

I've seen a bit of discussion about URDF and SDF here and I thought I'd ask the broad question before I try to learn either of them.

I am developing a natural language processor to split these out (and into simulations) and I should be aware of which one is better for which purpose (scene vs. robot, if that makes sense, even) or if one is being deprecated or something.

Should I be learning one or the other or both?

I'm all ears.

Sincerely,

-Todd

Hi All,

I was shopping for a physics engine that did, well, everything, and everybody pointed me toward Chrono.

It certainly does seem to fit the bill. Of course, not everybody is like me and wants to do molecular dynamics in the same space being used to represent your robot's CRAM belief state, but hey, it's the 21st century.

Is anybody (besides this guy: https://github.com/amelmquist/Chrono_... ) interfacing ROS with Chrono?

-Todd

Hi Crew,

Once again, I am here asking questions that have no business being asked of ROS people, but hey, ROS happens to be a wonderful message passing interface... even if you aren´t using it for robots.

The situation on my end is that I am writing an AI in Lisp (going fine, by the way) but there is a lot of reasoning (about biology, specifically) that happens in Prolog. In fact, it´s reasoning I´d prefer didn´t happen on my computer at all. Why not pass the biological (or other prolog reasoning) off to another machine entirely? ROS is proving to be a good MPI, but I am noticing that the KnowRob infrastructure may not be keeping up with new versions of ROS.

And heck, it isn´t like I have a robot that has to reason about a livingroom anyway.

What minimal source code would I need to exploit the capability of Lisp (I can port it to SBCL) to Prolog utilizing ROS connectivity? And considering this is ROS, I am certain there would be a build process involved. Furthermore, I would like to stay within the normal ROS standards (as if I had a choice) about building nodes.

Dreadfully sorry to start your day with questions like this. Any advice is appreciated.

Sincerely,

-Todd

I did another pull of the add-two-ints tutorial and it worked. By the way, I was not implying that there was a bug in SBCL. It´s just that I´m really putting the configuration of Lisp through a lot while doing other experiments. You saved me again. How do I close this?

I have what seems to be a completely standard ROSLisp configuration. I have the talker and listener tutorials working; in fact so does the add-two-ints-server, but the add-two-ints-client script triggers an error in SBCL:

The symbol "ADD-TWO-INTS-CLIENT-MAIN" is not external in the ROSLISP-TUTORIALS-BASICS package.

The script looks fine:

(ros-load:load-system "roslisp_tutorials_basics" "roslisp-tutorials-basics")
(roslisp-tutorials-basics:add-two-ints-client-main)

So I´m guessing that there is a manipulation of the package environment somewhere deep in the ROS libraries that may not work on every system. These guys on the Web discovered a pretty subtle bug that caused similar behavior. They said:

(DEFVAR *BUILT-IN-PACKAGES*
  (MAPCAN (LAMBDA (PACK)
            (CONS (PACKAGE-NAME PACK) (PACKAGE-NICKNAMES PACK)))
          (LIST-ALL-PACKAGES)))

You are destructively changing the package-nicknames list of PACK. Don't do that.

Changing this to:

(defvar *built-in-packages*
  (mapcan (lambda (pack)
            (cons (package-name pack) 
                  (copy-list (package-nicknames pack))))
          (list-all-packages)))

makes the problem go away.

Is it possible that having quicklisp installed would conflict with ROS? I´m at SBCL 1.3.1. Is it advised to upgrade?

-T

This thread is obsolete.

can´t continue this thread. Not enough room to add comments.

Progress on this one. My catkin workspace was all corrupted somehow (probably while attempting to install ros java and knowrob, both of which are still impossible). I just recreated the workspace and it worked.

So, I do have the talker and listener running in my little terminal sessions.

Hi Experts,

I finally have ROSLisp_REPL installed and it LOOKS like it did a good job but now I´m trying to deal with these tutorials. Any attempt to load the source code from the command line is a complete failure since all references to packages or anything else sbcl is expecting is just not there. Of course, I´m doing this all from source since there is no official release of ROSLisp for kinetic.

Now, I get it that this probably should be handled by an ROS package manager of some kind, since things like /msg and /srv files have got to be referenced somehow, but I don´t see any documentation on a package manager at all. I really don´t know how to determine what packages are installed (by asdf or ROS) either.

Does anybody know how to get this tutorial up and running either by hack or otherwise?

-Todd

Hi All,

I was loading the ROSLisp tutorials package (just with asdf, not through a ROS package manager) and I got this error:

ASDF could not load roslisp-tutorials-basics because Component ASDF/USER::ROSLISP not found, required by #<system "roslisp-tutorials-basics"="">.

I didn´t really care about not loading the package, but the ROSLISP user not being there creeped me out a bit. I´m wondering if I should do something about that.

Then I decided to just copy and paste the four functions for the addtwoints service) and I got yet another error. Is this just SBCL being all particular?

Open to ideas here. The error follows. -Todd

• (def-service-callback AddTwoInts (a b) (ros-info (roslisp-tutorials) "Returning [~a + ~a = ~a]" a b (+ a b)) (make-response :sum (+ a b))) ; in: DEF-SERVICE-CALLBACK ADDTWOINTS ; (ROS-INFO (ROSLISP-TUTORIALS) "Returning [~a + ~a = ~a]" A B (+ A B)) ; ; caught WARNING: ; undefined variable: A

; (DEF-SERVICE-CALLBACK ADDTWOINTS (A B) ; (ROS-INFO (ROSLISP-TUTORIALS) "Returning [~a + ~a = ~a]" A B (+ A B)) ; (MAKE-RESPONSE :SUM (+ A B))) ; ; caught WARNING: ; undefined variable: ADDTWOINTS

; (A B) ; ; caught WARNING: ; undefined variable: B ; ; compilation unit finished ; Undefined variables: ; A ADDTWOINTS B ; caught 3 WARNING conditions

debugger invoked on a UNBOUND-VARIABLE in thread #<thread "main="" thread"="" running="" {100399c8f3}&gt;:="" the="" variable="" addtwoints="" is="" unbound.<="" p="">

Type HELP for debugger help, or (SB-EXT:EXIT) to exit from SBCL.

restarts (invokable by number or by possibly-abbreviated name): 0: [ABORT] Exit debugger, returning to top level.

I lilke the suggestions on how to do all of this stuff on Indigo and older versions of Linux, but does anybody have any idea how to install ROSJava on Kinetic on 16.04? I mean, any instructions I follow, even installing from source, result in files not existing out there in the cloud.

I got the roslisp_repl working! Here´s what happened:

The first time I installed ROS, the desktop base installation didn´t work. I installed the bare bones version and after that, everything lisp related installed fine except the roslisp_repl from source or otherwise. The knowrob installation also failed from source or otherwise since (like roslisp_repl) the rosjava_core_tools component of rosjava was missing. After all, rosjava was missing entirely.

So, I uninstalled ROS entirely and tried the desktop base installation again, and the desktop installation worked! AND it looks like they made some progress with roslisp because the normal package installation of roslisp_repl worked! That handled rosemacs and all the slime configuration and everything. Amazing what happens if you just wait a couple of weeks.

Anyway, I´m still screwed with the knowrob installation. There hasn´t been any release on that since indigo and the source installation doesn´t build without having rosjava installed (can´t find rosjava_core_tools) and rosjava has not been released for kinetic yet.

Any ideas with the knowrob install? toddcpierce@gmail.com

Hi All,

I´ve been trying to install knowrob for weeks, but I get the rosjava_build_tools error. There doesn´t appear to be a way to install rosjava on kinetic. Any ideas how to get knowrob working without rosjava? Or, at least be able to communicate with prolog from lisp?

Hi Helpers,

I have been attempting to install all kinds of packages and most of them fail either because they don´t exist on kinetic or they don´t build from source because I don´t have the rosjava_build_tools to complete the catkin build process (on Ubuntu 16.04).

So, even though I have no reason for java, apparently I need it to build anything else from source.

I have tried to install it but have found no method that works. Any ideas?

Thanks,

-Todd

============ Update after comments (and reinstallation of kinetic) ===========

Okay, it looks like they got the ros-desktop-base installation finally working for kinetic. In fact, they finally got the installation for roslisp_repl working. So, part of my issue was handled just by waiting. But that still leaves this issue of catkin depending on rosjava and the rosjava_build_tools. I thought it would come along with the desktop install but it didn´t. What is the process I´m using to install rosjava? There is no process available to install from source or otherwise on kinetic on xenial.

todd@ubuntu:~/rosjava$ rosdep install --from-paths src -i -y
ERROR: the following packages/stacks could not have their rosdep keys resolved
to system dependencies:
rosjava_build_tools: No definition of [ant] for OS version [xenial]

In fact, even the apt-get installation of rosjava indigo doesn´t exist anymore. As I implied before, I don´t see why they even released kinetic if the build system isn´t even functional yet. For the time being, I´m trying to find a person knowledgeable with knowrob to see if I can get around this.

Hello,

So, through some miracle I installed roslisp and rosemacs... I think (it´s kinetic). What I´d really like to do is test it. I´ve never used emacs and lisp before but I hear it´s the best development environment ever. Where do I start? How do I know if emacs is configured to connect to (or start ) a lisp session?

Any advice is appreciated.

===== Update after last reply =========== Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of getting emacs to talk to SBCL with the ROS configuration through slime. Not the internal emacs lisp. I did have some success with this. I edited the .emacs file in home directory to include this:

(add-to-list 'load-path "/opt/ros/kinetic/share/emacs/site-lisp") ;; or whatever your install space is + "/share/emacs/site-lisp" (require 'rosemacs-config).

It added some interesting ros-related buffers to emacs. I´m till trying to figure out slime and connecting to sbcl

======== Update after Gaya´s suggestion to just do rosrun roslisp_repl roslisp_repl ========

Yes. I tried this earlier but couldn´t get roslisp_repl to install. HOWEVER, it finally ALMOST installed. I discovered that nothing (like knowrob) is properly installing (catkin making) on my system because rosjava didn´t come with the kinetic installation. Nor is there any way to install it, that I can see. There is not even a kinetic rosjava installation available from source:

wstool init -j4 ~/rosjava/src https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ros... Using initial elements from: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ros... ERROR in config: Unable to download URL [ https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ros... ]: HTTP Error 404: Not Found

So, it looks like I may be screwed here. If everything requires rosjava and there is no rosjava available for kinetic... well... punt.

Sincerely,

-Todd

Hello Again,

So I´m making progress here installing knowrob. I got this far:

todd@ubuntu:~/ros_catkin_ws/src$ rosdep install --ignore-src --from-paths stacks/ ERROR: the following packages/stacks could not have their rosdep keys resolved to system dependencies: knowrob_memory_graph: Cannot locate rosdep definition for [rosjava_bootstrap] knowrob_roslog_launch: Cannot locate rosdep definition for [rosbridge_server] knowrob_mesh_reasoning: Cannot locate rosdep definition for [rosjava_build_tools] knowrob_robohow: Cannot locate rosdep definition for [rosjava_messages] knowrob_meshes: Cannot locate rosdep definition for [rosjava_messages] knowrob_learning: Cannot locate rosdep definition for [rosjava_messages] knowrob_sim_games: Cannot locate rosdep definition for [rosjava_build_tools] knowrob_gui: No definition of [swi-prolog-java] for OS version [xenial] knowrob_openease: Cannot locate rosdep definition for [rosjava_messages] tf_prolog: Cannot locate rosdep definition for [rosjava_messages] knowrob_cad_models: Cannot locate rosdep definition for [iai_cad_downloader] knowrob_plan_summary: Cannot locate rosdep definition for [rosjava_bootstrap] knowrob_mongo: Cannot locate rosdep definition for [rosjava_build_tools] knowrob_saphari: Cannot locate rosdep definition for [rosjava_messages] json_prolog: Cannot locate rosdep definition for [json_prolog_msgs] semantic_map_to_owl: Cannot locate rosdep definition for [rosjava_messages] knowrob_vis: Cannot locate rosdep definition for [data_vis_msgs] knowrob_cram: Cannot locate rosdep definition for [rosjava_messages] knowrob_common: Cannot locate rosdep definition for [rosjava_build_tools] rosprolog: No definition of [swi-prolog-java] for OS version [xenial] knowrob_srdl: Cannot locate rosdep definition for [rosjava_build_tools] knowrob_chemlab: Cannot locate rosdep definition for [rosjava_messages] knowrob_cad_parser: Cannot locate rosdep definition for [rosjava_build_tools] knowrob_sim: Cannot locate rosdep definition for [rosjava_messages]

Anybody have any ideas?

--Todd

Actually, I somehow managed to get rosemacs installed. I´ll figure out whether the integrity of the environment is there at some point. So on to KnowRob, I tried starting the installation and I keep running into this same error:

todd@ubuntu:~/ros_catkin_ws/src$ wstool merge https://raw.github.com/knowrob/knowro... ERROR in config: Command requires a target workspace.

Why do I always get this error when using the wstool?

-Todd