Hi Hordur,
We've added ROS messaging to some of our modules at the Ocean Systems
Lab here at Heriot-Watt. As Ken mentioned, we have a (slightly old)
public repository of some of our code at:
http://code.google.com/p/hwu-osl-ros-pkg/
For those modules, I kept backwards compatibility with the lab's
proprietary protocol; with conditional compilation, which was a quick
solution, but could be improved upon.
For the time being, we've mainly used UDP based ROS publish-subscribe
messaging as a replacement for our existing UDP protocol, and
experimented with image transport with nodelets. Note that the default
ROS transport is TCP (lossless). I've had some experience of
implementing ROS services, and found that to be very straightforward,
but have yet to try actionlib. We plan to look into that in the near future.
My general experience of using ROS on AUVs has been very positive - it's
very useful to be able to leverage third party tools. I was just on a
water trial trial last week, and found rxbag and rviz particularly
helpful for replaying and visualising AUV navigation logs downloaded
over WiFi whilst still on the boat.
There may be ROS messages and algorithms for point clouds and laser
scans that can be applied in some way to AUV sonar sensors, but we
haven't investigated that yet. One other thing to note - the ROS
coordinate xyz coordinate system is 'forward, left, up', as opposed to
the AUV standard 'forward, right, down'. They're both right handed
coordinate systems, though, so it's a simple conversion - our code for
this is at the bottom of:
http://code.google.com/p/hwu-osl-ros-pkg/source/browse/trunk/hwu_osl_common/osl_core/include/osl_core/GeneralMath.h
Best regards,
Joel
Hörður Jóhannsson wrote, On 24/11/10 14:52:
> Hi everyone
>
> I'm interested to know if anyone has used ROS on AUVs. If so what has
> been your experience? Have you released or found any useful packages?
>
> Thanks,
> Hordur
>
>
>
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--
Research Assistant
Ocean Systems Laboratory
Heriot-Watt University, UK
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