Announcing New Stack: ROSOSC and touchosc_bridge

Announcement by Michael Carroll (Auburn University) to ros-users

Greetings ROS Users,

I am please to announce a new stack that I've been working on: ROSOSC. Code and documentation for my "beta" release are available immediately on the ROS.org wiki.

ROSOSC is a set of utilities and nodes for interacting with Open Sound Control hardware and software devices.

One of the main features is the ability to interact with TouchOSC (created by hexler: http://hexler.net), the iOS application, to create dynamic, touch-interactive, control surfaces that can be used with ROS. These control surfaces can be composed of several different types of controls, such as push buttons, toggle buttons, faders, rotary knobs, labels and LEDs. Most of the controls support two-way communication with ROS, which allows users to change color, position, size, and visibility of all of the controls on the page via ROS topics.

There are two main ways of interacting with TouchOSC with ROS:

• Using a "default handler" - Simply create a layout file in the freely available TouchOSC editor, and then launch the ROS touchosc_bridge node. All of the controls on the page will show up as topics that can be published to/subscribed to using ROS.
• Using a "tabpage handler" - Users can also create a python module that can directly interface with OSC clients. There are many features available to developers, including multiple client support, client join/quit callbacks, and client tabpage switching callbacks. More can be found out on the wiki and API documents.
  • API Docs are available on the ROS wiki
  • Two tabpage handlers are included out of the box:
    • Diagnostics_handler - a tabpage for viewing diagnostics and aggregate diagnostics data
    • teleop_handler - a tabpage for broadcasting command velocity messages to holonomic and differential drive robots.

I hope that you find this useful in your robotics projects, and I'm excited to see some of the future uses of the TouchOSC and Open Sound Control interfaces.

To get an idea of the basic features, I have made some YouTube videos:

• Loading Layouts using ROSOSC
• Using the Diagnostics Tabpage
• Using the Teleop Tabpage

Thanks,

~mc