[ros-users] ROS Client Library for Lua

[Tim Niemueller]

Hello ROS users.

During the last weeks we have developed a Lua-based API to write ROS 
nodes in the Lua programming language. It allows for communicating with 
other nodes and participate in the ROS universe. It has been developed 
at Intel Labs Pittsburgh as part of my research stay this year working 
with Dr. Siddhartha Srinivasa on the Personal Robotics project.

Some highlights of the implementation:
- Completely written in Lua, no wrappers
- Implements topic and service communication
- Reads message specifications on the fly and generates appropriate
   data structures at run-time, avoiding offline code generation
- Fully documented API
- only about 2800 lines of code (ohcount)
- Test scripts for all features and simple examples

The implementation benefits from the inherent single-threading in Lua, 
meaning that everything is processed in a single main loop. This is one 
of the major factors for its simplicity. No attempts have been made to 
incoporate Lua add-ons that would provide true multi-threading. The 
implementation has by far not the same versatility as the Python or C++ 
API (and we do not aim at that), but it does provide a very simple way 
to interact with ROS and do this directly without a middle-man from Lua.

The endeavor has been conducted to prepare for porting the Fawkes 
behavior engine to ROS, which is a framework for developing robot 
behavior employing Lua as its scripting language.

We would be delighted if the community would take a look at the 
implementation and provided some feedback. Once it has reached a certain 
stability and the feature set has been expanded to an acceptable 
coverage we would like to propose this for inclusion in the experimental 
package tree.

You can find the source code at http://github.com/timn/roslua. Some 
documentation on how to get started is provided in the README file.

Regards,
	Tim

-- 
AllemaniACs RoboCup Team            KBSG - Knowledge-Based Systems Group
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