On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 9:35 AM, William Woodall wrote: > Wow, thanks Jack, the ROS specific part of your gps code will probably work > for us.  I think your right though, ROS should have a standardized gps msg > that can be linked through a standard gps-to-odom node that can do these > calculations for you given just your gps topic.  I really appreciate your > help, this should really save us a lot of time implementing and > troubleshooting these calculations. You're welcome to use any of that code, it is all open source. Please report any bugs you find. There is currently one known defect. I believe it is in the device driver, not the ROS interface: http://code.google.com/p/utexas-art-ros-pkg/issues/detail?id=2 I believe the main reason ROS currently has no standard GPS message is because all the WG work is done with indoor robots. If several projects agreed on a common GPS message format, I expect the ROS developers might agree to put it in a common place like nav_msgs. That would allow us to better share code. Or, we could create a GPS stack with some more cleanly separated packages in utexas-art-ros-pkg. A common GPS monitoring package would be useful, for example. The GPS support we have right now is not very general. I like your idea for a common ROS package to translate GPS input into standard Odometry and tf messages. For some applications extra latency might be undesirable, but message bandwidth is not a problem. In our system, most navigation and obstacle detection is done using Odometry, there are only a few components (dealing with maps and such) that need GPS information. -- joq