[ros-users] Persistence Nodes

Mike Purvis mpurvis at clearpathrobotics.com
Wed Jan 19 20:28:12 UTC 2011


Hey,

I'm in the process of re-factoring an in-house GUI/waypoint/nav system that
we use for product testing, and I had an architectural question that I
wanted to ask here.

Basically, the GUI allows the creation of waypoints and paths, and then
robots may be sent on these paths. Currently, the GUI node itself is a
fairly thin front-end to a "path manager" node, which does the work of
persisting the waypoints and sending goals out to the navigation nodes on
the individual robots. I'm looking at splitting off that functionality to a
per-robot "planner", though, which would then access the data in the path
manager, and be instructed directly by the GUI which waypoint to pursue (via
a service).

The thing is, that leaves the path manager as an extremely simple node. It's
really just a data store with a couple of services which expose CRUD
operations on structured data.

What's the ROS Way when it comes to a thing like this? Looking to TF as an
example, it seems that distributed may be a better model. Instead of
building my "path manager" as a node, should it instead be a library which I
include with every node which would need to access the shared data pool?
Unlike TF, this is not data which has a time-based expiry, so there would
need to be provision made for any node (for example, a new robot joining the
system) to request a "full update."

Is this a synchronization nightmare? Are there any other good examples of
how data is persisted within ROS networks?

Thanks.

--

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