[ros-users] is a native ROS device possible?

Nikolai Ensslen nensslen at synapticon.com
Tue Jun 12 11:46:07 UTC 2012


Thanks Brian for mentioning our solution and sorry folks for no information
about ROS support for SOMANET being available online yet. At
ICRA/ROSCon/Automatica we were announcing the release of a lightweight ROS
client library for XMOS-based devices like SOMANET, which we call rosxmos. 

See this diagram for illustration:
http://www.synapticon.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/ROS-SOMANET-2.png

rosxmos implements the essential ROS communication standards XMLRPC for
publishing and subscribing to services/topics and TCP/UDPROS to send and
receive message data. Programming a SOMANET User App (for example to do
inverse kinematics for a limb, locally process sensor data or realize some
hi-fi control loops), you can decide to use rosxmos like a client library to
communicate with a ROS master and other nodes. 

rosxmos-based nodes are built using the SOMANET compiler, not the ROS build
system. Thus you can look at it as being proprietary, but we think this is
not the right term, as everything of SOMANET you are interested in as an
application developer is open-source (drivers, control packages, example
apps...). So will be rosxmos, which is also why it will be released in an
open ROS Pkg repo as soon as we think of it as being mature to be made
available to the community. We can't tell right now when this will be, but
we're working hard to be able to release a version around IROS 2012.

As soon as it is ready, of course all are welcome to contribute to the
development and extend the range of ROS features being available through
rosxmos. Until then we'd be happy to answer your questions!

Nik

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Von: ros-users-bounces at code.ros.org [mailto:ros-users-bounces at code.ros.org]
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Gesendet: Montag, 11. Juni 2012 21:00
An: ros-users at code.ros.org
Betreff: ros-users Digest, Vol 28, Issue 10

Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2012 11:47:33 -0700
From: Brian Gerkey <gerkey at osrfoundation.org>
To: User discussions <ros-users at code.ros.org>
Subject: Re: [ros-users] is a native ROS device possible?
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On Fri, Jun 8, 2012 at 11:06 AM, John Galloway <jrg at toasterfish.com> wrote:
> It appears (i.e. just reading the docs, I haven't brought up a ROS env
yet) that at present every ROS device has to have an executable (or driver)
on a host (which is found in the package for that device). ?It would seem
ideal that a device using USB (for example) could have its driver embedded
to allow a generic USB driver to detect that this is a ROS device and link
it into the graph of nodes (allowing the device to publish and subscribe
etc) without a device specific driver being needed. ?Is this possible within
the current APIs?

Somewhat related are the embedded motor control boards developed by
Synapticon (a ROSCon 2012 sponsor):
http://www.synapticon.com/
They have some XMOS-based boards that "speak" ROS natively.

    brian.






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