Dear meta-ros users,
in the past, I have been contacted in private if meta-ros could include the kobuki_base packages.
So far, there were no recipes for specific robots in meta-ros, such as the kobuki, turtlebot or PR2, mostly because I do not have any robot at my desk. However, I could spend some time creating the recipes. If there are no major issues to cross-compile the package, the recipes should be easy and quick to get done.
Hence before getting started on that activity, I have two questions:
- Are you interested to have support for a specific robot?
We will of course start with the recipes for the robot that is most useful for the majority of the meta-ros users.
- Have you already developed some recipes for some robot?
Please let us know here, so that we do not duplicate our efforts.
Best regards,
Lukas
Hi Lukas,
I think it is a good idea to include robots, specially those used by many people as the Turtlebot. In the case of my company, we did a workaround to avoid writing recipes for the Turtlebot as we just wanted to do some quick tests.Having these would have been useful.
However, I am not sure whether it should be included in the same meta-ros repository. On one side I think it makes sense, to avoid further synchronization problems, but I do not see any hardware-specific recipe in the repo.
Best,
Javier V. Gomez
Dear Javier,
thanks for your reply. From your post, I am confirmed that recipes for the turtlebot are a good starting point. Let’s see what others think.
To your question whether to include the recipes in the same meta-ros repository. I would stay with the pragmatic solution to include the recipes in the repository as long as they do not strictly require or modify any global changes in layer’s configuration (which I currently do not foresee).
If all recipes are in one repository, it simplifies the configuration management compared to maintaining several repositories that depend on each other. The meta-ros community is not so large after all. Maintaining all content in one repository would not make the content and number of changes so large that we cannot handle the maintenance work efficiently.
Best regards,
Lukas
Dear all, dear Javier,
If you have been following the current development on the master branch of meta-ros, you might have noticed that we now finally provide a number of recipes for the kobuki robot.
We provide recipes for 103 packages, including all packages from ecl_tools, yujin_ocs, rocon, kobuki_core and kobuki.
We tested that all of those packages build and I checked that all runtime dependencies are declared as defined in the package.xml. However, we never checked if all of those tools and packages run on a cross-compiled image. So, we ask the potential users to report if there are any further issues that we are not aware of.
As my spare time admits, I will continue to work on providing all recipes for turtlebot. A work-in-progress state is provided on the wip-turtlebot branch in my personal meta-ros fork. The currently most challenging part is to get openni2-camera cross-compiling. The speed of progress on that overall activity will however be largely driven by the number of user requests for turtlebot. Currently, some meta-ros users and contributors are asking for assistance on other interesting topics for meta-ros. So, progress on turtlebot support is currently not on my personal priority list.
Best regards,
Lukas