On Jun 8, 2012, at 12:00 PM, Morgan Quigley wrote:

I heartily agree the long-term vision of allowing embedded systems to
plug-and-play into a live ROS system, where "plugging in" the embedded
device would be analogous to launching a "typical" ROS node's POSIX
process. This will require a great deal of work to make possible, but
it's on my long-term wish list as well.

-Morgan

On Jun 8, 2012, at 12:00 PM, Jonathan Bohnen wrote:
You can check out his [Morgan's] thoughts on the subject here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wnab6AjAwc&feature=player_detailpage#t=1648s

Have you looked at rosserial? http://ros.org/wiki/rosserial While I haven't used it, it seems like it gets part of the way there by having embedded devices that talk in ROS messages, and they just connect to a generic rosserial driver on a host machine: http://ros.org/wiki/rosserial_python

best,

-j

Thanks guys. Good video (cool hand!) and rosserial does seem to be along the lines I had in mind. As for what I'm trying to do, really sort of just thinking about what I might like to try and do actually. Last time I took a break from employment and was playing with robotics I thought what was really needed to get more folks working at the application level was to make it much much easier to build a robot, which I found rather challenging (more like buying a cpu, motherboard, DIMMs, disks, powersupply and case and building a PC, no soldering required). So you'd need electro-mechanical subsystems that could plug and play, which ROS (and its brethren) I think are making much more possible now than 6 yeas ago. So now that I'm between jobs and again thinking about what I want to do when I grow up, I'm just catching up to see where things are, whats going on etc in that general direction (looks good!).