ROS Ruby Client: rosruby

ROS is Robot Operating System developed by OSRF and open source communities.

This project supports ruby ROS client. You can program intelligent robots by ruby, very easily.

Homepage: http://otl.github.com/rosruby Git: http://github.com/OTL/rosruby Author: Takashi Ogura Copyright: 2012 License: new BSD License Latest Version: 0.4.3

Requirements

• ruby (1.8.7/1.9.3)
• ROS (hydro/groovy)

electric/fuerte

If you are using electric or fuerte, please use v0.2.1.

Install (binary)

sudo apt-get install ros-hydro-rosruby

then you have to source /opt/ros/hydro/setup.bash for ruby library path.

Install from source

Install ROS and ruby first. ROS document is http://ros.org/wiki/ROS/Installation . rosruby uses genrb for message generation. After install genrb, .rb message files are automatically compiled if there are message source package exists in your catkin_ws/src directory.

rosruby uses catkin. If you have not catkin_ws yet, please read this wiki.

$ cd ~/catkin_ws/src
$ git clone https://github.com/OTL/genrb.git
$ git clone https://github.com/OTL/rosruby.git
$ cd ~/catkin_ws
$ catkin_make

Install from source (indigo/jade)

Try indigo-devel branch.

$ cd ~/catkin_ws/src/rosruby
$ git checkout indigo-devel
$ cd ~/catkin_ws
$ catkin_make

Message generation

You must generate ROS msg/srv files for rosruby if the msg/srv packages are not compiled from source. If you are using catkin package, it is easy. Please add below to your package CMakeLists.txt.

find_package(rosruby)
rosruby_generate_messages(message_pkg1 message_pkg2 ...)

Or, you can generate it manually. Please use the msg/srv generation script (rosruby_genmsg.py) in order to generage rosruby messages.

For example, (please replace catkin_ws to your catkin workspace)

$ rosrun rosruby rosruby_genmsg.py geometry_msgs nav_msgs -d ~/catkin_ws/devel/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/

If you want to generate msg/srv files from source (for example your project), it is automatically generated by genrb.

Sample Source

You can get rosruby sample programs from rosruby_tutorials package.

Subscriber

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require 'ros'
require 'std_msgs/String'

node = ROS::Node.new('/rosruby_sample_subscriber')
node.subscribe('/chatter', Std_msgs::String) do |msg|
  puts "message come! = \'#{msg.data}\'"
end

while node.ok?
  node.spin_once
  sleep(1)
end

Publisher

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require 'ros'
require 'std_msgs/String'

node = ROS::Node.new('/rosruby_sample_publisher')
publisher = node.advertise('/chatter', Std_msgs::String)

msg = Std_msgs::String.new

i = 0
while node.ok?
  msg.data = "Hello, rosruby!: #{i}"
  publisher.publish(msg)
  sleep(1.0)
  i += 1
end

Note

Ruby requires ‘Start with Capital letter’ for class or module names. So please use Std_msgs::String class instead of std_msgs::String. rosruby message compiler automatically generates messages by the rule.

Samples

There are rosruby_common that contains actionlib and tutorials.

Do all tests

Install some packages for tests.

$ sudo apt-get install rake gem
$ sudo gem install yard redcarpet simplecov

run tests.

$ rake test

Documents

you can generate API documents using yard. Document generation needs yard and redcarpet. You can install these by gem command like this.

$ gem install yard redcarpet

Then try to generate documentds.

$ rake yard

You can access to the generated documents from here.

catkin and CMakeLists.txt

rosruby’s CMakeLists.txt defines some macros for your package that uses rosruby. you can use these if you add find_package(rosruby) to CMakeLists.txt.

• rosruby_setup() : setup some macros and variables for rosruby
• rosruby_generate_messages(message_pkg1 message_okg2 …) : generates rosruby msg/srv files
• rosruby_add_libraries(files or dirs) : install lib files for devel environment.