[ros-users] nimbro_network: Multi-master ROS network solution

[Tommy Persson]

On 2015-09-22 18:51, Mike Purvis via ros-users wrote:
>     No, tf is copied across as it is. Also, our system has no message
>     introspection capabilities, so changing fields inside a message would be
>     difficult. Our policy so far has been to avoid TF name clashes
>     across all
>     systems. This is certainly annoying in multi-robot scenarios, but I
>     haven't
>     seen a nice, completely robust solution yet.
>
>
> Hugely annoying, yes. The gold standard for ROS multimaster is
> definitely when each individual robot looks exactly like a
> non-multimaster robot, and can be added to the multimaster system with
> no modifications to its underlying launchfiles, topics, diagnostic
> outputs, TF frames, etc. But that obviously requires some sophistication
> at the robot boundary to handle translation. And it gets interesting in
> sim, for.... well, a variety of reasons.

We have tried to solve that by requriring a namespace for each robot. In 
our case we use /uav0 , /uav1, /operator0, and so on.

Does it not become confusing if you run without prefix for each robot. 
Then if you forward a pose and prefix it you might on one robot  get the 
topics:

/pose
/uav1/pose

and on the other

/pose
/uav0/pose

Is this really the gold standard? We find it more convenient that we on 
all robots get:

/uav0/pose
/uav1/pose

Or did you mean that you also translate locally and add prefix?

/Tommy Persson
Linköping University
Sweden