July 2009 Archives

ROS 0.7.1 has been released! This is a patch release, with the bulk of changes addressing regressions that occurred with the 0.7.0 update. If you have experienced issues with rosrecord, roslaunch, or rxplot, you may wish to install this update.

Fixes:

• roslaunch: fix to printerrlog issue in __init__.py
• rosdep: mplement a one-step 'install' argument
• rosrecord:
  • fix in time scaling related to playback of multiple bags.
  • fix in rpath being cleared on install to $ROS_ROOT/bin
  • fixed bug over-aggressively resizing a message buffer
• rostopic: better error message if topic type is invalid and minor fixes
• rxplot:
  • added missing time import
  • fix bad wxwidgets swig wrapper import
  • bug fixes to errors when invalid topic name or spec are given
• rosbuild:
  • fix to dependency management for auto-generated source files
  • very probable fix for the delete-a-file problem
• rospy: ignore spurious exception caused in receive_loop during interpreter shutdown
• rosemacs: minor updates due to rostopic changes
• rosdep: pygame, python-clearsilver, debian updates, qt3, log4cxx (OS X)
• rosconfig: fix bug that was raising an exception in all non-svk installs

ROS 0.7 has been released. The 0.7.x series introduces many new features and bug fixes. The two biggest changes are "Publisher latching" as well as the deprecation of the old roscpp "Node" API.

Publisher latching: Publisher latching lets you automatically send the last message published to new subscribers. This has many uses cases. For example, instead of writing a map Service, you could have a map Topic. A Topic is preferable as you can then record the map data using rosrecord. Another use for publisher latching is to reduce the publication rate for data that is slowly changing, as you can now more easily ensure that new subscribers will receive the latest data automatically. Previously this was possible using subscriber callbacks, but this streamlines implementations. By default, rostopic pub now latches, so you can use it to quickly 'latch' a value into the ROS Computation Graph.

Node API deprecated: roscpp's Node API is now deprecated in favor of the NodeHandle API. Some of the NodeHandle methods have been deprecated as well. Please update your code as the Node API will be removed in future releases. Please see the notes below for specific details on NodeHandle methods that have been deprecated.

For a more detailed list of changes, please see the changelist.

To download this release, please visit the download page.

We've also put together a new tutorial to introduce the ROS concepts and associated command-line tools. This is still a work-in-progress, but feel free to check it out.

Awhile back we showed a demo video using an iPod Touch to drive around of a PR2. It was a fun experiment, but it relies on a proof-of-concept that's not quite ready for primetime.

Srećko Jurić-Kavelj of the University of Zagreb showed us that there's more than one way to get data from an iPod Touch into ROS. Instead of cross-compiling ROS onto the iPhone, which is still very difficult, he used the open-source accelerometer-simulator project on Google Code to receive the accelerometer on another computer. He was then able to easily adapt a sample Python script to broadcast that data as a rospy node.

You can see the results here as he drives around a Pioneer 3DX: