Useful Resources

External Resources to Learn ROS

• A Gentle Introduction to ROS: we will use a couple of chapters from this book, however, as the book is C++-based its utility will be limited for our purposes.
• The ROS tutorials are a great place to learn the basics

ROS Cheatsheet

Show all topics currently being published

$ rostopic list

Show details of a message

$ rosmsg show rospackagename/msgname

Notes: works well with tab completion, add -r for original source

Show Messages Published on a Topic

$ rostopic echo topic

Notes: can be performed on topics and sub-parts of topics

Publish Messages on a Topic

$ rostopic pub --rate=x topic message-type

Notes: double tap tab, then it’ll fill out a stub for you. Rate, x, specifies how often to publish the message.

Visualize Sensor Data

$ rosrun rqt_gui rqt_gui

Notes: To make a time series plot go to plugins, visualization, plots. Then choose topic (scan/ranges[0] for example). You can also add more than one topic at a time.

Rviz

$ rosrun rviz rviz

Notes: can also just type rviz