Hydro will include an updated version of the nmea_gps_driver package.

nmea_gps_driver is a simple NMEA driver. It supports reading NMEA strings
from a serial port or topic and outputting the appropriate ROS messages.
Currently supported output messages are sensor_msgs/NavSatFix for
positional information, geometry_msgs/TwistStamped for velocity information
reported by the GPS unit and sensor_msgs/TimeReference to output the
current time according to the GPS unit. This driver is meant to be
cross-platform and avoid a dependency on GPSd.

For convenience, the major API changes for Hydro are:

   - nmea_gps_driver.py is now deprecated and will be removed in I-Turtle.
   Replacement node is nmea_serial_driver.py .
   - Refactored code into NMEA parser, common ROS driver and added separate
   nodes for reading directly from serial or from topic.


I've created an API review page:

http://www.ros.org/wiki/nmea_gps_driver/Reviews/2013-05-22_API_Review

If you are interested in this driver, please take a look at the ROS API of
the nmea_gps_driver package and share your comments on the review page. If
you do leave a comment, please add your name to the list of reviewers and
subscribe to the page in order to receive notifications of replies.

- Eric Perko