May 26 archive

ROS Integration for Fawkes

Fawkes and ROS are robot software frameworks, each with unique features. Recently, we have added plugins to Fawkes to participate in the ROS ecosystem as a ROS node. Furthermore we have created rosfawkes. It encapsulates Fawkes in a ROS package for straight-forward inclusion.

The Fawkes ros plugin allows users of Fawkes to benefit from the wealth of code that is being written for ROS nowadays. Other components can access ROS and communicate with other nodes via topics or provide or invoke services. Fawkes plugins can be written that benefit from the focus and infrastructure on these closely implemented components, much like nodelets on steroids.

The rosfawkes package embeds Fawkes into ROS and provides a specialized main application embeds Fawkes in a ROS node. The package makes it possible to use all of Fawkes' libraries and tools in ROS nodes. For example, the ros-webview integration plugin allows ROS nodes to extend the Fawkes webview web interface.

With this code we have only made the first step, but an important one. We strive for an even closer integration in the future.

The basic installation instructions for the two ways of integration are described in the (preliminary) rosfawkes documentation.

Posted by Tim Niemueller on May 26, 2011 00:03