[ros-users] multi-master support for Fuerte

[Ken Conley]

On Thu, Sep 8, 2011 at 4:30 AM, Jeff Rousseau <jrousseau at aptima.com>
<JRousseau at aptima.com> wrote:
> Hey Folks,
>
>
>
> I haven’t seen the topic brought up lately, so I’m not sure if someone is
> already working on this for Fuerte—What is the state of multi-master support
> in ROS and are there any plans for further development?

The Fuerte planning is in progress, but there are currently no plans
on my end re: multi-master work.  During the Electric development
cycle, we played around a bit with multimaster_experimental and
developed the app_manager, which is one (of many) approaches for doing
multi-master work. We started off wanting to do multi-robot, but
rosjava refocused our efforts on using an Android device to interface
with a robot -- similar techniques, but different assumptions.

Our general conclusion there was that multi-master is very
application-specific as you have to make assumptions about
connectivity and configuration in order to pull it off.  The
app_manager has a master-syncing approach that works under good
connectivity; more work is necessary to make it work under bad
connectivity and really test it in multi-robot scenarios (it was
generally used for multi-master, single robot use case).

I do plan on seeing what can be done in the wifi realm re: ROS, i.e.
things that will improve a single master, multi-machine setup.

> I’ve been using
> foreign_relay for a number of months and it mostly works, but I’d like to
> see first-class multi-master support in ROS and am willing to commit
> development time towards it.

Glad to hear it, what do you have in mind?

> PS I noticed “Building Manager” meeting notes which had discussions about
> implementing proper multi-master support seems to have stalled…

See above.

cheers,
Ken

>
>
>
> Jeff
>
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