hi Rosen,

I agree that this is a great idea, and it something that various
people have experimented with, but for which there's currently no
single best answer that I know of.  In addition to rosmultimaster:
 * https://code.ros.org/svn/wg-ros-pkg/branches/trunk_boxturtle/sandbox/foreign_relay/
 * http://github.com/jonfink/multimaster-ros-pkg
 * http://www.ros.org/wiki/proxy
Also, I've heard that the folks at Lincoln Labs are working on a
"tunnel" that uses (non-ROS) multicast UDP to relay messages between
robots.

I would love to see a solution that allows opportunistic connections
between nodes on different robots (or more generally, associated with
different masters).

	brian.

On Sat, Apr 24, 2010 at 5:28 AM, Rosen Diankov <rosen.diankov@gmail.com> wrote:
> dear ros-devs,
>
> would it be possible to relay a namespace into a different namespace,
> much like symbolic links work in file directories? there's many uses
> of this like being able to switch the images+camera info+features used
> for vision processes, however one interesting usage is controlling
> multiple robots.
>
> Currently we have a roscore running on every robot, and we would like
> to keep it that way since this guarantees the internal modules
> performing basic safety/avoidance/sensor queries continue to perform.
> The issue arises when we want to have multiple robots interact within
> the same framework. Obviously we want message shared between them, but
> having a roscore running offboard the robots is not a good solution
> since the robots should freely move around the environment (ie outside
> the lab). Therefore, we would still like to have separate roscores per
> robot.  However, when the robots come close to each other, they can it
> would be great if one robot can 'mount' the root ros namespace of the
> other robot's roscore, and vice versa. Although we haven't tried this,
> it seems easily achievable with the rosmultimaster node and
> functionality allowing namespaces to be relayed... what do people
> think about this?
>
> rosen,
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