2011/5/5 qiang yu
<yuq825@gmail.com>
As I know EROS is for cross compiling ROS to a powerful embedded board which already running some powerful OSes (like Linux). There is no light weight ROS client for less-powerful embedded boards. I used to look for one too. But now I plan to port one in C myself.
You don't need a full distro to run ros, we've installed it to something as small as a custom busybox based system. The only requirements for getting a basic system up and running with ros messaging for custom embedded software are the c/c++ libs, the apache libs (apr, apr_util, log4cxx) and boost. Certainly doesn't need a powerful distro.
Eros just provides tools for doing that (and if something's missing that you need, please suggest or incorporate it so others can take advantage of it too).
Nonetheless, roscpp and those logging libraries are sometimes more than you need/want on a really tiny board and we're quite partial to the idea of a light version of roscpp for the excruciatingly embedded. Morten Kjaergaard experimented with developing a light version of roscpp setting up pubsubs and using only boost asio (for tcp/ip sockets), xmlrpc (fpr ros master connections) and just printf style logging. You can find that in the roscpplight package in eros (trunk). That might be good as a starting point or even better, flesh out a design and collaborate on this.
You could probably even drop boost asio if you wished, though short term its convenient to help speed up development and may actually be better in the long run. We've also talked about is using syslog for logging. Troy has also talked about different registration mechanisms to xmlrpcpp (aka zeroconf), but thats a change that can't be isolated to a light version of roscpp.