Important troubleshooting tips in ROS

We will now look at some of the common issues that are experienced when working with ROS, as well as tips on how to solve them.

One of ROS in-built tools to find issues in an ROS system is roswtf. roswtf is a command-line tool that checks for issues in the following areas of ROS:

• Environment variables and configuration
• Packages or meta-packages configuration
• Launch files
• Online graphs

Using roswtf

We can check the issues inside an ROS package by simply going into the package and entering roswtf. We can also check for issues in our ROS system by entering the following command:

$ roswtf

This command generates a report about the health of the system—for example, in the case of a wrong ROS hostname and master configuration, we will have the following report:

Figure 17: roswtf output in the case of a wrong ROS hostname configuration

We can also run roswtf on launch files to search for potential issues:

$ roswtf <file_name>.launch 

The wiki page of roswtf is available...