Please ask about problems and questions regarding this tutorial on answers.ros.org. Don't forget to include in your question the link to this page, the versions of your OS & ROS, and also add appropriate tags.

Rocon Launch for Multiple Masters

Overview

This tutorial shows how to use the rocon_launch tool to spawn multiple terminals, each with it's own embedded roslaunched instance possibly connected to multiple ros masters.

On it's own this is not so useful, but when using either the gateway model, or the full concert framework, this saves alot of tedium starting and debugging across multiple masters.

Demo

Launcher

The format for the rocon launcher is exactly the same as that introduced in the single master tutorial with the exception that the port attribute for each launch tag can be specified separately. An example launcher - save this as multimaster.concert:

   1  <concert>
   2   <launch title="babbler:11311" package="rocon_launch" name="talker.xml" port="11311">
   3     <arg name="topic_name" value="babbler"/>
   4   </launch>
   5   <launch title="chatter:11312" package="rocon_launch" name="talker.xml" port="11312">
   6     <arg name="topic_name" value="chatter"/>
   7   </launch>
   8 </concert>

Launching

> rocon_launch multimaster.concert --screen

Note that this demo as it is, is ultimately not that useful. It simply spawns two talkers in separate ros masters that have no connection to each other. You'll need something like the rocon gateways to really do something.