Hey Patrick,

I agree that a page at ros.org would be very useful. Perhaps my response below would be better suited as a comment to the answers.ros posting but I'll put it here anyway...

Regarding communication between Matlab & ROS, a colleague of mine here at Penn, Nathan Michael, actually wrote a 'bridge' between them using IPC. You can use the bridge to publish and subscribe to any topic of currently supported message types. In my opinion, it's a very impressive infrastructure that he set up and it works very well. I'm TAing a course in which I have the students install it and use it for their projects for faster development on their projects.

The whole software is two stacks that you need to add to your ROS_PACKAGE_PATH and compile. I managed to throw in IPC as a ros package so that 'central' can be brought up from within a launch file as well. One launch file (that you can obviously include in your standard launch files that you bring up) is all it takes to bring up central and the bridging nodes. I ROSified it as much as possible.

You can check out some tutorials I wrote at the links below.

Tutorial on IPC-Bridge:
https://alliance.seas.upenn.edu/~meam620/wiki/index.php?n=Roslab.IpcBridge

Subscribing to Kinect image topics in Matlab:
https://alliance.seas.upenn.edu/~meam620/wiki/index.php?n=Roslab.KinectMatlab

I hope that helps somewhat,
-- ben



On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 1:56 PM, Patrick Bouffard <bouffard@eecs.berkeley.edu> wrote:
One gap I see in the ROS ecosystem right now is information about
tools and methods to interoperate with some of the most common tools
for display and analysis like Matlab, LabView, SciPy etc. In some
cases there are bits and pieces here and there; a search for 'matlab'
on the ROS wiki does bring up some useful tidbits. Bgut especially for
new users I think it would be useful to have some sort of portal page
or pages on the wiki similar to the Robots and Sensors pages that can
bring together the disparate tools and methods for working with these
systems.

I was going to post this on answers.ros.org but it seemed like more of
a 'discussion' topic -- I can start a page but it might be good to
brainstorm first on what should go there and how to structure things.
And of course whether others would consider this a useful addition as
well.

Plus, ros-users is just too quiet these days. :)

Cheers,
Pat
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