Client-side frame manipulation

[mescarra]

Hello! So here's my setup:

• I have a headless robot running the roscore along with many nodes, one of which is the headless frame_editor.
• On the other side, I have a PC that I use to connect to my robot through ethernet and where I have some nodes that display the information coming from the topics published by the robot.

The robot may or may not be used along with a PC (the PC is just used for diagnose).

I would like to be able to modify the frames published by the frame editor node running on the robot, using the rqt frame editor interface, but I'm not sure if that's possible.

So far, I've found a very dirty workaround, which is launching the rqt_frame_editor node on my PC, but reusing the same node name that it is used on the robot. That way, ROS throws an error of two nodes with the same name and it kills the headless one and the rqt interface loads up. This approach has many disadvantages:

• When I close the rqt window, frames are lost
• I have to keep two copies of the frame file (one on the robot and one on my PC).

Am I doing something completely wrong here or this feature is not supported yet?

[ipa-lth]

Hi, Right now the gui and the underlying frame publishing mechanism are not that decoupled. You cannot connect the gui to another backbone.

There is however a ros service Interface to manipulate frames. So you should be able to 'remotely' set frame coordinates or change parent frames, however without gui support.

If you need something in the gui not available with service calls, it fairly easy to add those.

Let me know if this helps you. Cheers

[mescarra]

This is very helpful!

I have tried the services and they work just fine, so the rqt_service_caller kinda solves the problem for a GUI for editing frames.

Thank you very much for your help!