SMACHA ROS Documentation

SMACHA ROS is a package that provides ROS integration for SMACHA.

Its main component is a SMACHA server that allows for templates to be loaded from disparate packages and accessed from anywhere within the ROS network, loads template metadata onto the parameter server for use with, e.g. the ReconCell SMACHA GUI, and provides services for each of the main SMACHA functions.

SMACHA Server

Services

The SMACHA server provides a number of ROS services where, in each case, service requests may be handled in one of the following three ways:

  • the request itself is a SMACHA script string,
  • the request refers to a ROS parameter containing a SMACHA script string,
  • the request refers to a ROS parameter containing a SMACHA script filename.

The currently available services are as follows:

  • the Generate service: uses the SMACHA Generator to generate SMACH Python code from SMACHA scripts,
  • the Contain service: uses the SMACHA Contain tool to containerize linear state sequences in SMACHA scripts,
  • the Extract service: uses the SMACHA Extract tool to extract sub-scripts from super-scripts.

Template Metadata Parameters

Template metadata is automatically published to the ROS parameter server for every template loaded by the parameter server (assuming a meta block is present in the template).

Installation

The smacha_ros package forms a part of the main SMACHA stack, so it is installed alongside SMACHA by following its installation instructions.

Usage

Launching a SMACHA Server

Launching a SMACHA server can be done as follows:

$ rosrun smacha_ros smacha_server -t `rospack find smacha`/test/smacha_templates/smacha_test_examples

Here, the -t argument specifies directories containing additional templates that should be loaded by the server outside of the core API templates which are always loaded by default.

Further arguments and options may be explored by running rosrun smacha_ros smacha_server -h or rosrun smacha_ros smacha_server --help.

Using Scripts with the ROS Parameter Server

Scripts may be used with the ROS parameter server in one of two ways, by either setting a parameter to hold the script filename:

$ rosparam set /seq_filename `rospack find smacha`/test/smacha_scripts/smacha_test_examples/seq.yml

or by loading the script itself (i.e. the contents of the file) onto a parameter:

$ rosparam load `rospack find smacha`/test/smacha_scripts/smacha_test_examples/seq.yml /seq_script

Since SMACHA scripts are written in YAML and the ROS parameter server is designed to handle YAML, this latter method is advantageous in that once the script has been loaded, different parts of the script, can be directly accessed, e.g.

$ rosparam get /seq_script/template

returns the name of the base template being used by the script:

$ rosparam get /seq_script/template
$ Base

Calling the Generate Service

Calling the Generate service using the parameter containing the filename from the above example:

rosservice call /smacha/generate /seq_filename

of using the parameter containing the script itself:

rosservice call /smacha/generate /seq_script

will result in the same outcome, that is, the generated SMACH Python code string being returned.

Calling the Contain Service

The following command demonstrates how to call the contain service in order to replicate the example from the SMACHA Container States tutorial:

$ rosservice call /smacha/contain /seq_filename SUB StateMachine [FOO_0,FOO_1]

Calling the Extract Service

If we assign the output of the previous Contain service call to an environment variable:

$ CONTAINED_SEQ=`rosservice call /smacha/contain /seq_filename SUB StateMachine [FOO_0,FOO_1]`

then we can load the generated script onto the parameter server:

$ rosparam set /contained_seq "$CONTAINED_SEQ"

before calling the Extract service in order to extract the SUB state from the script:

$ rosservice call /smacha/extract /contained_seq/script SUB

Templating

The SMACHA ROS package provides ROS state templates as well as other ROS templates in order to provide ROS integration and additional functionality, for example:

  • Templates for publishing arbitrary messages to topics,
  • Templates for performing TF transforms,
  • Templates for parsing messages into selected types,
  • Templates for recording ROS bags,
  • etc.

Other SMACHA Packages

SMACHA

The SMACHA package contains all of the main SMACHA functionality.

SMACHA GUI

The SMACHA GUI package provides a visual programming interface for SMACHA for use within the ReconCell Project.

SMACHA ROS API

Templates

These are the core smacha_ros package templates:

State Templates

Other Templates

Indices and tables