roslaunch/2008-09-18 roslaunch Specification Review

Package Developer: KenConley

Reviewers:

Agenda

The focus of this review will focus on the features that roslaunch provides as well as the XML format of the roslaunch files. In particular:

These are the currently open feature/bug tickets:

Please add your questions/answers here:

Establish the state of the ROS runtime environment, including the master, parameters, nodes, and services
Correctly tear down the ROS runtime environment
Restart ROS nodes as necessary
Support multi-machine setups

rosout is preferred over routing console output to screen.
Getting console output from remote processes to the local screen is not a priority. rosout is the solution there.
Morgan uses roslaunch on each machine, and it works "awesome".
Groups cannot be combined; i.e., a group can be declared only in one place.
Startup errors (e.g., executable bit not set) are communicated by the "process died" message to console from roslaunch. If respawn is set, you may get a fast sequence of startup / die messages.
Once support is added for referencing xmlparam and yamlparam files, roslaunch will call out to them (i.e., not reimplement that functionality)
After roslaunch dies, parameters stay up; use the master tag to control this behavior.
Will eventually add 'roscore' that brings up rosout, master, and param server. Works in a singleton fashion, not restarting any of these core services.
Can we extend the singleton behavior to user-defined ros nodes? No need, because the master will kill the first instance of two nodes with the same name already.
We could add the 'start' attribute to the node tag, allowing the user to specify start or restart. No, don't do that; instead use multiple roslaunch files (either with multiple invocations of roslaunch, or with one invocation and use of the include tag)
How is include pathing done? It happens rospack-relative. All includes happen on the local machine.

PASSED!