Inspecting and diagnosing the ROS system
While the system is running, there are several nodes publishing messages and there are nodes providing actions or services. In the case of a very large system, it becomes important to have tools that can provide information about the running system. However, the ROS provides a set of basic and very powerful tools for system inspection, from the CLI to GUI applications.
Getting ready
In Chapter 2, ROS Architecture and Concepts – I, we discussed listing nodes, topics, services, and parameters. The CLI commands rosnode list,rostopic list,rosservice list, and rosparam list provide the most basic level of introspection. Any of these commands can also be combined with regular bash commands to look for the desired nodes, topics, services, or parameters, such as grep:
$ rostopic list | grep speedHow to do it…
ROS provides several powerful GUI tools for system introspection. First of all, we will discuss rqt_top, which shows nodes and resources they are using...
