Array parameters

Next Generation ROS
1

The parameter design wiki page says this about parameters comprising arrays of primitives:

Support for arrays of primatives
During the API discussions supporting arrays of primatives was discussed and deferred. Adding support for arrays in the interface is relatively straight forward. It slightly increases the complexity of the API for users, but can support several use cases. A use case for arrays of numbers is expressing a matrix or vector, addressing each position in a matrix by some sort of row-column naming scheme can get very cumbersome.

Two questions:

  1. Are there any plans to implement this? I’d like to port a package to ROS2, but it requires the ability to specify parameters in vector/matrix format.
  2. If there aren’t any plans, are there specific objections to a contribution to enable this functionality?

Apologies if I’m missing something and this is already supported.

2

I believe we were planning to implement lists of parameter primitives as part of our beta-3 work on parameters, but it looks like that will be pushed until after beta-3 unfortunately.

I don’t know if it will get prioritized or not before the first release. I hope we have time to do it, as I think it’s a pretty important feature for parameters.

3

OK, good to know. Thank you!