2.7.x

The Orocos RTT/ROS Integration has been heavily refactored and extended in the 2.7 release. Part of this is due to the new Catkin buildsystem standard in the ROS community, but also it is due to long-desired enhancements to the integration packages.

Prior to the 2.7 release, the packages which interfaced core RTT functionality with core ROS functionality was split across four "stacks":

1. rtt_ros_integration: RTT plugins for communicating with ROS
2. rtt_ros_comm: RTT Typekits for rosgraph_msgs and std_msgs
3. rtt_common_msgs: RTT Typekits for common_msgs
4. TODO: rtt_geometry: RTT typekits for KDL datatypes and RTT plugins for TF

In the 2.7.0 release, the packages from these four repositories have been reorganized. The two repositories which only contained typekits (rtt_ros_comm and rtt_common_msgs) were moved into rtt_ros_integration under a directory called "typekits".

The rtt_rosnode package from the old rtt_ros_integration stack has also been refactored. In previous releases, it contained the following tools:

• Scripts to create RTT/ROS packags
• CMake build and code-generation scripts to create RTT typekits from ROS messages
• An RTT plugin called "ros_integration" which instantiated a ROS node and provides several services
  • An RTT global service called "ros" for constructing ROS topic connection policies.
  • An RTT activity for publishing messages to ROS topics
  • An RTT component service called "rosparam" for loading and saving RTT component properties as ROS parameter server parameters.

In this release, the "rtt_rosnode" has been split into four packages:

• "rtt_ros": Core ROS system integration
  • Convenience launchfiles and wrapper scripts for running Orocos programs (typegen, deployer, etc)
  • An RTT global service for importing ROS packages and their dependencies
• "rtt_rosnode": Contains a plugin for creating a ROS node in an RTT program
• "rtt_roscomm": Contains ROS communication plugins including:
  • ROS msg primitives typekit
  • An RTT transport plugin for communicating via ROS topics and RTT ports
  • An RTT plugin for serving and calling ROS services via RTT operations
  • A tempalte and package generator for integrating new ROS msg and srv types
• "rtt_rosparam": Contains a plugin for synchronizing a component's properties with ROS parameters

There are also several API changes related to importing plugins from ROS packages, creating ROS topic connections, and synchronizing RTT properties with ROS parameter server parameters.

See each package's individual CHANGELOG.rst for more details.

2.6.x

0.5.x

As of the ROS Electric release, the orocos_toolchain_ros stack is split up in 5 different stacks:

• orocos_toolchain: containing the bare orocos packages
• rtt_ros_integration (now a stack!): containing all orocos-ros integration code
• rtt_geometry: containing integration code for working with orocos and tf
• rtt_ros_comm: RTT typekits for the ros_comm messages
• rtt_common_msgs: RTT typekits for the common_msgs messages

0.4.x

The stack contains all of the Orocos Toolchain v2.4.x integrated in the ROS build system. The orocos_toolchain_ros stack contains utilmm, utilrb, typelib and orogen, to automatically create ros packages for the automatic typekit generation for C++ classes.

On top of the Orocos Toolchain v2.4.x this stack contains:

• rtt_ros_integration: This package contains the following:
  • The ros-plugin: this RTT plugin allows Orocos/RTT components to contact the ROS master
  • CMake macro's to automatically create Orocos/RTT typekits and transport plugins from .msg files
• rtt_ros_integration_std_msgs: This package shows how the CMake macro's have to be used, it creates the Orocos/RTT typekits and transport plugins for all roslib and std_msgs messages
• rtt_ros_integration_example: This package shows how the rtt_ros_integration should be used from an Orocos/RTT user/developer point of view. It contains a HelloRobot component which can be contacted using rostopic echo

0.0.x