colin.heffernan's profile - activity

I am currently running ROS between an Ubuntu VM on my Mac and a Debian (Raspbian Jessie) Ditsro on board a Raspberry Pi. I can ssh into the Pi as a regular user from the Ubuntu VM and run nodes with no issues. When I run the nodes through a launch file on the Ubuntu VM with a remote machine tag for the Raspberry Pi under the same user, however, the nodes appear to run under a different user or as a service. The PIDs displayed by roslaunch for the remote nodes are valid and no errors are indicated, but I can only see the processes on the raspberry pi if I ssh into it and run

ps -el

More importantly, one of the topics published by these remote nodes seem to get picked up and the serial port used by one of them does not transmit data.

I imagine this is some sort of permissions or user error, but any help would be greatly appreciated! I am running ROS indigo on both machines.

I am interested in controlling a robot over ROS with a combination joystick, touch screen interface such as the Nvidia Shield Portable. I know that libraries exist for running ROS on Android, and Mirza Shah actually wrote a teleop node for the Shield Portable, but it unfortunately looks like that particular product has been discontinued.

While it appears that any android device may suffice, I am looking to control the robot from up to 100 yards away, so I am particularly interested in any devices that are known to have good Wi-Fi range and ROS performance. I know that Ubuntu touch is an option as well, but I am not sure how to gauge the merits of using the Ubuntu Touch or Android implementation on a mobile device. Feature wise, I primarily just want to broadcast a joy topic for my onboard CPU to interpret, but I would also love to have access to other features like rqt_plot and the dynamic reconfigure utility.

Any information that could help guide my decision making here would be greatly appreciated!

I am trying to run the master of my ROS network on a Ubuntu 14.04 virtual machine inside a Mac OS X El Capitan host but am having some networking configuration issues. I enabled port forwarding on the VM and adjusted firewall settings on my Mac so that SSH connections and a few ROS connections can go from non-master devices to the master. Right now, my remote machines are able to successfully recognize topics published by the master but are unable to see the actual data through a "rostopic echo".

In revisiting the ROS Network setup tutorial, I realize that "There must be complete, bi-directional connectivity between all pairs of machines, on all ports".

Simply put, what is the most appropriate way to ensure this requirement when running the ROS master inside a VM on a Mac OS X Host? I was able to open a few ports, but trying to open each one individually does not seem practical given the number of ports ROS presumably uses.

Thank You!