[ros-users] ROSTest: Verify Publications

[Dirk Thomas]

Hi Kyle,

We try to reserve this list for announcements and high level
discussion and we ask our users to ask questions like this on
answers.ros.org, see:

http://wiki.ros.org/Support

Please post your question on answers.ros.org and wait for people to
have a look at your question there.

Thanks,
- Dirk


On Wed, Oct 15, 2014 at 6:57 AM, Fazzari, Kyle R CIV NSWCDD, G82
<kyle.fazzari at navy.mil> wrote:
> I have several pieces of software in ROS, all of which are pretty thoroughly unit and integration tested. However, there's one aspect of testing within ROS that I have yet to accomplish with much success: Verifying publications.
>
> Note that I'm still stuck in the dark ages of Fuerte, but I believe my question is relevant to more recent releases as well.
>
> I currently have several tests within rostest, which looks like this in my CMakeLists.txt:
>
>     rosbuild_add_executable(my_tests EXCLUDE_FROM_ALL ${MY_TESTS})
>     rosbuild_add_gtest_build_flags(my_tests)
>     rosbuild_add_rostest(${PROJECT_SOURCE_DIR}/test/node/node.test)
>
> Running this with `make test` also runs a roscore (since node.test is a launch file), so these tests can make use of classes that require a connection to roscore. I'd like to use this to verify publications, but it's not working reliably, which makes me think I'm doing something wrong. As an example:
>
> class TestSubscriber
> {
>     public:
>         TestSubscriber() : receivedMessage(false) {}
>
>         void callback(const std_msgs::Int32ConstPtr &newMessage)
>         {
>             receivedMessage = true;
>             message = newMessage;
>         }
>
>         bool receivedMessage;
>         std_msgs::Int32ConstPtr message;
> }
>
> TEST(MyTest, TestPublication)
> {
>     // This class is the one that will publish on the "output" topic. It will create a node handle
>     // and advertise in its constructor.
>     MyPublishingClass publishingClass;
>
>     ros::NodeHandle nodeHandle;
>
>     TestSubscriber subscriber;
>     ros::Subscriber rosSubscriber = nodeHandle.subscribe("output", 1, &TestSubscriber::callback, &subscriber);
>     ASSERT_EQ(1, rosSubscriber.getNumPublishers()); // This passes
>
>     publishingClass.publishMessage();
>
>     ros::spinOnce(); // Spin so that publication can get to subscription
>
>     EXPECT_TRUE(subscriber.receivedMessage); // This may or may not be true
> }
>
>
> Depending on how the MyPublishingClass is written, this test may pass or fail due to that last line. To give a specific example, I have a class that reads through a bagfile and publishes specific topics. If that class publishes topics with:
>
>     publisher.publish(rosBagViewIterator->instantiate<std_msgs::Int32>());
>
> the test passes. If instead the class publishes with:
>
>     publisher.publish(*rosBagViewIterator);
>
> the test fails (even though the node still runs normally outside of the test, so I know that publication is actually happening). I have more examples of similar weirdness, but I'm hoping this is enough to describe my problem.
>
> So, down to my questions:
>
> 1) Why is this so finicky? I realize that it's basically a node subscribing to its own publication, but that shouldn't be a problem. Should it?
> 2) Am I doing this wrong? Is there a better way to test ROS publications? Note that the class in question is _not_ a complete ROS node, and cannot be tested as such.
>
> Thank you for your help!
>
> --------------------
> Kyle Fazzari
> Computer Engineer
> kyle.fazzari at navy.mil
>
>
>
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