T045T's profile - activity

I thought tf_prefix, the feature of the tf system, was adequately emulated with URDF parameters. Sure, it's a bit clunky, but at least it works with all packages. Is there something I'm missing?

First off: tf_prefix has been not-really-supported for a long time. It's much safer to expect it to not work at all.

Now that that's out of the way, it sounds like there's something wrong with your tf trees, or maybe the fixed frame of your ros3djs visualization.

Have you looked at the output of

$ rosrun tf view_frames

to see if there are any unconnected parts?

If everything's properly connected, check that your TFClient has a fixedFrame that is actually part of the tree.

MoveIt! is a popular choice for inverse kinematics. Take a look at the documentation. The tutorials there will help you to configure a solver and use RViz for controlling your arm.

Once that's working, it's just a small step to use InteractiveMarkers in ros3djs to do the same from a web browser.

Is this a ros3djs specific problem, i.e. do you have interactive markers working in RViz, but not ros3djs?

If you don't, you'll need a package that generates those markers first.

You can look to http://wiki.ros.org/cob_interactive_t... or http://wiki.ros.org/turtlebot_interac... for inspiration on how to use interactive markers for teleoperation :)

Thanks! Forking rosdistro looks like the way to go :) But it would be nice to have a way to "overlay" rosdistro, so we don't have to rebase our fork when the official rosdistro files are updated...

We have a set of ros packages that depend on each other, but are all still in development, i.e. not released. This means the only way to get them is to check out their latest versions from git and build them in the local catkin workspace.

But then, one has to manually find the repository URLs for all dependencies and clone those too.

Actually, the same is true for system dependencies on a system where one does not have apt permissions (i.e. a lab computer).

Now, I'm aware I could set up a workspace with all the packages using wstool and then share that, but this is inconvenient for developers who only need an independent subset of packages.

What I'd instead like to do is resolve dependencies automatically, like rosdep does, but instead of using a package manager to globally install them, have their source checked out into a local catkin workspace.

This is what I imagine the workflow looking like:

$ mkdir -p catkin_workspace/src && cd catkin_workspace/src
$ catkin_init_workspace
$ git clone https://company_server.com/ourcoolpackage.git
$ cd ourcoolpackage
$ rospack deps | rosdep --download-source --target-folder=..
$ # recursive solving of dependencies would be great, too
$ cd ../..
$ catkin_make # everything magically works!

Adding a custom source to rosdep seems like a step in the right direction, but I can't find a way to have rosdep just download sources.

Is there already some tool that does this and that I overlooked?

I think the remaps in your launch file should be params. Otherwise, your code looks like it should work :)