[ros-users] Dynamic Deployment and Control of Nodes

[Ken Conley]

It's great to hear you want to contribute some useful new tools.

There is some work that I have on the shelf that should help dovetail with this:

1) New scripting API for roslaunch. The work I'm doing on the rosh is
helping evolve the roslaunch API. I hope to have this landed in
unstable soon. Once the scripting interface is solid, it should be
trivial to add a network API on top (XMLRPC).

2) Interfaces. The plan is to convert the Node API clearsilver specs
on the wiki into actual YAML node specifications. The idea here is
multifold:

  i) Machine-readable spec of what topics, services, parameters, etc..
a node provides/uses. This is useful for validation, documentation,
GUIs, etc...
  ii) Machine-readable spec that can be used to bootstrap a node initialization
  iii) Standardization of common APIs (e.g. camera interface)

For example, imagine (in pseudocode):

n = Node('camera.interface')
p = n.pubs['camera/image_raw']
image = load_from_disk('foo.jpg')
r = Rate(10)
while ok():
   p.publish(image)
   r.sleep()

I focused more on rosh this cycle so interfaces are still all concept,
no design or implementation. I hope to work on them after I finish up
my Diamondback work.

I think that the main challenge in deploying this sort of solution is
going to be converting existing code to provide these specifications.
It will take a lot of time. While it is possible to try and
automatically determine this information, there are many cases where
it will fail badly, which isn't good for a "user friendly" GUI.

 - Ken



On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 5:54 AM, William Woodall <wjwwood at gmail.com> wrote:
> I am currently beginning development on a "rostoolbox" initially for my own
> use, but with some loftier end goals.  Currently my goal will be to
> implement existing functionality from command line arguments that ros
> provides, including roslaunch, rosrun, and rosparam, into a GUI.  I hope to
> have an interactive view similar to rxgraph's output which could allow for
> dragging to rename topics, interactively adjusting static and dynamic
> parameters, and adding/removing nodes.  Then finally when your done crafting
> your setup you can save out as a launch file.  Like I said, initially I want
> this to just be able to list, create, compile, and install dep's of stacks
> and packages from a GUI, but the sky is really the limit after that as to
> how interactive the system could be.  I would also like to see this
> eventually ported to the roswin32, because for my peers that use Windows
> having a tool like this will almost be required for them to start using ROS
> on Windows.  If you want to do some joint development maybe we could discuss
> this more.
> Thanks,
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> William Woodall
> Graduate Software Engineering
> Auburn University
> w at auburn.edu
> wjwwood at gmail.com
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>
>
> On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 2:49 AM, Morten Kjærgaard
> <Morten.Kjargaard at prevas.dk> wrote:
>>
>> Hi
>>
>> I am planning on creating a graphical tool to give mode dynamic control of
>> what nodes are started and the names of the topics they subscribe to.
>> This will probably require some changes in the core of my ROS system, but
>> it seems to be possible.
>>
>> The motive is to improve the deployment- and parameter management when
>> creating a new robot system based on existing ROS packages. And make it
>> possible to relate this to a robot model. Instead of only having to rely on
>> static hardcoded launch files.
>>
>> I would like to hear from anyone who has experience with a similar
>> approach or are otherwise interested in a management tool like this.
>>
>> Best regards,
>> ---------------------------
>> Morten Kjaergaard
>> Industrial PhD Student
>>
>> Prevas A/S
>> Frederikskaj 6
>> DK-2450 Koebenhavn SV
>>
>> morten.kjargaard at prevas.dk
>> www.prevas.dk
>> _______________________________________________
>> ros-users mailing list
>> ros-users at code.ros.org
>> https://code.ros.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-users
>
>
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