Parameters¶

In this exercise, we will look at ROS Parameters for configuring nodes||

Motivation¶

By this point in these tutorials (or your career), you've probably typed the words int main(int argc, char** argv) more times than you can count. The arguments to main are the means by which a system outside scope and understanding of your program can configure your program to do a particular task. These are command line parameters.

The ROS ecosystem has an analogous system for configuring entire groups of nodes. It's a fancy key-value storage program that gets brought up as part of roscore. It's best used to pass configuration parameters to nodes individually (e.g. to identify which camera a node should subscribe to), but it can be used for much more complicated items.

Reference Example¶

Understanding Parameters

Further Information and Resource¶

Roscpp tutorial

Private Parameters

Parameter Server

Scan-N-Plan Application: Problem Statement¶

In previous exercises, we added a service with the following definition:

# request
string base_frame
---
# response
geometry_msgs/Pose pose

So far we haven't used the request field, base_frame, for anything. In this exercise we'll use ROS parameters to set this field. You will need to:

Add a private node handle to the main method of the myworkcell_node in addition to the normal one.
Use the private node handle to load the parameter base_frame and store it in a local string object.
- If no parameter is provided, default to the parameter to "world".
When making the service call to the vision_node, use this parameter to fill out the request::base_frame field.
Add a <param> tag to your launch file to initialize the new value.

Scan-N-Plan Application: Guidance¶

Open up myworkcell_node.cpp for editing.
Add a new ros::NodeHandle object to the main function, and make it private through its parameters. For more guidance, see the ros wiki on this subject.
```
ros::NodeHandle private_node_handle ("~");
```

Create a temporary string object, std::string base_frame;, and then use the private node handle's API to load the parameter "base_frame".

private_node_handle.param<std::string>("base_frame", base_frame, "world"); // parameter name, string object reference, default value

Add a parameter to your myworkcell_node "start" function that accepts the base_frame argument, and assign the value from the parameter into the service request. Make sure to update the app.start call in your main() routine to pass through the base_frame value you read from the parameter server:
```
void start(const std::string& base_frame)
{
  ...
  srv.request.base_frame = base_frame;
  ROS_INFO_STREAM("Requesting pose in base frame: " << base_frame);
  ...
}

int main(...)
{
  ...
  app.start(base_frame);
  ...
}
```
Now we'll add myworkcell_node to the existing workcell.launch file, so we can set the base_frame parameter from a launch file. We'd like the vision_node to return the position of the target relative to the world frame, for motion-planning purposes. Even though that's the default value, we'll specify it in the launch-file anyway:
```
<node name="myworkcell_node" pkg="myworkcell_core" type="myworkcell_node" output="screen">
  <param name="base_frame" value="world"/>
</node>
```
Try it out by running the system.
```
catkin build
roslaunch myworkcell_support workcell.launch
```
- Press Ctrl+C to kill the running nodes
- Edit the launch file to change the base_frame parameter value (e.g. to "test2")
- Re-launch workcell.launch, and observe that the "request frame" has changed
  - The response frame doesn't change, because we haven't updated vision_node (yet) to handle the request frame. Vision_node always returns the same frame (for now).
- Set the base_frame back to "world"

Open Source Feedback

See something that needs improvement? Please open a pull request on this GitHub page