Robotics - ROS2 Basic Pub Sub Node

Install ROS2

This is only to install ROS2-iron-desktop for quick desktop experiments. In general I’d like to use docker containers though.

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# Remove any corrupted ROS2 keyrings.
sudo rm /etc/apt/keyrings/ros-archive-keyring.gpg
sudo mkdir -p /etc/apt/keyrings

# Download ROS2 GPG key
curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ros/rosdistro/master/ros.asc | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/keyrings/ros-archive-keyring.gpg

# Verify the GPG keys are added correctly
# Should see "ros-archive-keyring.gpg"
ls /etc/apt/keyrings/

sudo rm /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ros2.list
echo "deb [arch=$(dpkg --print-architecture) signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/ros-archive-keyring.gpg] http://packages.ros.org/ros2/ubuntu $(lsb_release -cs) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ros2.list > /dev/null
sudo apt update

# install comprehensive ROS2, like rviz, rqt, and demos
sudo apt install -y ros-iron-desktop
sudo apt install -y python3-colcon-common-extensions
sudo apt install ros-iron-joint-state-publisher
sudo apt install ros-iron-xacro

echo "source /opt/ros/iron/setup.bash" >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

# Run a talker and listener.
ros2 run demo_nodes_cpp talker
ros2 run demo_nodes_cpp listener

Create a Python Package For Publisher & Subscriber

• mkdir -p ~/ros2_ws/src && cd ~/ros2_ws/src
• Create a package ros2 pkg create --build-type ament_python --dependencies rclpy std_msgs
  • --build-type specifies that this is a python pkg.
  • ros2 pkg create my_mixed_pkg --build-type ament_cmake --dependencies rclcpp rclpy std_msgs is the command for creating cmake and python package.
  • Package naming: in ros2, please use _ instead of -, like py_package_1 instead of py-package-1
• File Directory

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├── dummy_test
│   ├── demo.py
│   ├── __init__.py
├── package.xml
├── resource
│   └── dummy_test
├── setup.py

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- `resource`: holds files that do not need executable permissions like config, launch files, data files etc.
- python executables **NEED executable permissions**, so they need to placed in `dummy_test`

• setup.py: so we can create exportable modules (along with ament_python_install_package(${PROJECT_NAME})). It’s NOT used for creating python nodes
• See this page for creating python nodes

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from setuptools import setup, find_packages

package_name = 'dummy_test'

setup(
    name=package_name,
    version='0.0.1',
    packages=find_packages(),
    install_requires=['setuptools', 'rclpy'],
    zip_safe=True,
    maintainer='Your Name',
    maintainer_email='you@example.com',
    description='A minimal ROS 2 publisher node',
    license='Apache License 2.0',
    entry_points={
        'console_scripts': [
            'demo = dummy_test.demo:main',
        ],
    },
)

• dummy_test/demo.py: this is the console script that could be found by the Python environment’s bin
  • Note: main() function must be defined

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import rclpy
from rclpy.node import Node

from std_msgs.msg import String


class MinimalPublisher(Node):

    def __init__(self):
        super().__init__('minimal_publisher')
        self.publisher_ = self.create_publisher(String, 'topic', 10)
        timer_period = 0.5  # seconds
        self.timer = self.create_timer(timer_period, self.timer_callback)
        self.i = 0

    def timer_callback(self):
        msg = String()
        msg.data = 'Hello World: %d' % self.i
        self.publisher_.publish(msg)
        self.get_logger().info('Publishing: "%s"' % msg.data)
        self.i += 1


def main(args=None):
    rclpy.init(args=args)

    minimal_publisher = MinimalPublisher()

    rclpy.spin(minimal_publisher)

    # Destroy the node explicitly
    # (optional - otherwise it will be done automatically
    # when the garbage collector destroys the node object)
    minimal_publisher.destroy_node()
    rclpy.shutdown()

• Build and run

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chmod +x dummy_test/resource/dummy_test
colcon build --packages-select dummy_test --symlink-install
source install/setup.bash
ros2 run dummy_test demo

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- `--symlink-install` allows in-place modifications in `colcon build --packages-select dummy_test --symlink-install`

Custom Messages

You can define constants in a .msg for its field values

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# my_interface/msg/Status.msg

# constant definitions
uint8 OK=0
uint8 ERROR=1
string  LABEL="status"

# fields
uint8 code
string message

In cpp, this becomes:

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struct Status
{
  using _code_type = uint8_t;
  static constexpr uint8_t OK    = 0;
  static constexpr uint8_t ERROR = 1;
  static constexpr char LABEL[]  = "status";

  _code_type code;
  std::string message;
};

There’s an open design effort (and PR #685 in rosidl) to add proper enum support to the underlying IDL, but it isn’t released yet. Until then, you must either wrap or validate in C++ if you want real enforcement. You can do msg.code = 42; and nobody stops you. So we need to define a enum class:

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enum class StatusCode : uint8_t {
  OK    = Status::OK,
  ERROR = Status::ERROR
};

Latched Topic

One can check a latched topic using: ros2 topic info /TOPIC --verbose

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Durability: TRANSIENT_LOCAL

• If durability were VOLATILE, this topic is not latched

Built-in Example

• ros2 pkg prefix demo_nodes_cpp
  • To inspect a package’s path, do ros2 pkg prefix <PKG_NAME>

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