[ros-users] Dynamic Deployment and Control of Nodes

[Ken Conley]

Given that interfaces were seeded by your work with
dynamic_reconfigure/driver interfaces, it's great to see your
interest.

One of the reasons I put it on the shelf for a little bit was to think
about how far to extend the spec with respect to
parameterization/templating, and figuring out the most elegant way to
capture that.

As two examples:

1) Camera interface: these actually remap on the name 'camera', and I
want to be able to capture this
2) Costmap: this accepts parameters that describe the sensor topics it
uses as input. This case is especially hard because there is
effectively a list of topics set by a parameter.

I don't want to block progress on covering all potential cases, but it
is important that 'interfaces' at the very least cover the existing
sorts of interfaces out there, as well as be suitable replacements for
the NodeAPI documentation.

 - Ken

On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 9:53 AM, Blaise Gassend <blaise at willowgarage.com> wrote:
> Hi Ken,
>
>> 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)
>
> This is a concept that I was pretty excited about, and which I put
> into dynamic_reconfigure from the start. I'm now finding it to be
> pretty limiting for some nodes, such as the pr2_camera_synchronizer.
>
> The guts of the synchronizer are very flexible, and able to
> accommodate new cameras, triggers and projectors. Ideally, I would
> like to use parameters to tell the camera_synchronizer what the
> hardware it is working with is, but I currently can't do that because
> the parameters are set at compile time.
>
> I'd love to discuss your ideas for a Node spec that would allow
> parameter-dependent parameters, services, etc. Or is the idea that the
> spec would not be all-encompassing for a node like the
> camera_synchronizer? (Right now I'm toying with allowing dynamic
> generation of the dynamic_reconfigure configuration.)
>
> Blaise
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