Program Robots Like a Boss
This tutorial is a practical guide on how to use rostopic and rosmsg command line tools to debug a ROS topic. If you wonder how to monitor the publishers you’ve created, how to easily print the data from a topic, or even how to monitor a topic’s bandwidth, this post is for you. Through a … Read more
This tutorial is a practical guide on how to use rosservice and rossrv command line tools to debug a ROS service. You know those command line tools are useful, but it’s hard for you to really understand how to use them efficiently? Well, this tutorial is for you. I’ll show you step by step exactly … Read more
In this tutorial I’ll show you how to use and compile WiringPi in your ROS Cpp nodes, so you can talk to hardware devices from your ROS application. Make sure to read this introduction to WiringPi before if you don’t know the library well. The WiringPi library is a great tool for Raspberry Pi (4, … Read more
You’re programming with ROS, or are just getting started, and you wonder: should you use Python vs Cpp with ROS? Of course… It depends. But in this post I’ll try to go beyond this “it depends” answer, to give you some points on when to you use one language or the other. To this question, … Read more
In this tutorial I’ll show you how to use ROS Duration in your ROS code – for roscpp and rospy. Through several examples you’ll see some of the most common use cases where ROS Duration is useful. Also, for each example you’ll learn about the differences between the Python and Cpp implementation, which is sometimes … Read more
Rqt graph is a very useful tool to see what’s going on in your ROS graph. It’s a GUI plugin from the Rqt tool suite. In this tutorial I’ll show you how to install and use it. What is rqt graph Rqt graph is a GUI plugin from the Rqt tool suite. With rqt graph … Read more
In this tutorial I’ll show you what is ROS rqt plot and how to use it efficiently, through some examples. What is rqt plot and what to do with it Rqt is a very useful ROS tool to help you during your ROS development. It’s based on the Qt framework and includes a lot of … Read more
In this tutorial I’ll show you how to install ROS Melodic on your Raspberry Pi 3 (B or B+), with Ubuntu MATE 18.04. Why ROS on Raspberry Pi A Raspberry Pi board is perfect for being embedded in a robot: It’s small – credit card size, and already has mounting holes. It’s powerful enough to … Read more
In this tutorial you’ll learn how to use a ROS timer in Cpp (roscpp Timer) to publish data at a fixed rate, inside a node. That will be extremely useful for all kinds of sensors you’re using in a robot. I have also create the same tutorial for Python, check it out here. So, you … Read more
ROS Rate is a powerful ROS feature you can use for your control loops – be it for reading a sensor, controlling a motor, etc. In this tutorial I’ll explain to you what is a ROS Rate, and you’ll see the code to use a rospy Rate and a roscpp Rate. Let’s get started! ROS … Read more