rosonic

This is the library to make you as fast as Sonic in developing python-based ROS packages. The name does not actually come from Sonic, but "ROS (made pyth)onic" since the main motivation is making ROS nodes, well, more pythonic. Doing this allows for a more comfortable workflow, the code becomes more "natural" and easier to understand.

To alleviate some of the issues described in Motivation rosonic tries to gently "force" the user to follow a design pattern. Namely, rosonic conceptualizes a ROS node as a class in a simple, pythonic way with reasonable default behaviours.

Requirements

rosonic has been developed for ROS Melodic and above, i.e Python 2.7, Python 3.6 and above. However, at writing moment only Python 3.6 has been tested. As soon as I'm transitioning my other projects to Noetic then I will drop any support for Python 2.7.

Installation

This package is available on PyPI and can be installed as a normal pip package.

pip install rosonic

Usage

Creating a Node

The rosonic barebones, do-nothing ROS node now looks like this

#! /usr/bin/env python

from rosonic import Node

class my_node(Node):
    pass

if __name__ == '__main__':
    my_node()

The default behaviour of a rosonic.Node will be to call rospy.spin. This is useful for the "Subscriber" and "Pub-Sub" patterns in Motivation, then we only need to implement initialization and callbacks. For the initialization, just create a normal __init__ for the class that doesn't take any arguments. Any resources, e.g. pub, can be set as object fields (self.pub) and callbacks can be implemented as methods.

class my_node(Node):

    def __init__(self):

        self.pub = rospy.Publisher(...)
        rospy.Subscriber(..., self.callback)

    def callback(self):

        self.pub.publish(...)

When calling my_node() you (in order) initialize the ROS node with the class name, load parameters, create the my_node instance and call my_node.main. The default main method will call the spin which in turn, by default, calls rospy.spin.

def main(self):
    while self.keep_alive():
        self.spin()
    self.shutdown()

def spin(self):
    rospy.spin()

The added bonus of these defaults is that it is very easy to do the "Publisher" pattern as well. You specify a rate, write __init__ as before and overload the spin method. If, however, you want completely different still then you need to overload main, which is fairly simple in itself!

from rosonic import Node, Rate

class my_node(Node):

    rate = 10

    def __init__(self):
        ...

    def spin(self):
        ...

Parameters as class attributes

It isn't the mountain ahead that wears you out - it's the grain of sand in your shoe

What's the easiest way to declare a parameter? Maybe like this...

#! /usr/bin/env python

from rosonic import Node, Parameter

class my_node(Node):

    IMAGE1 = Parameter('~image1', 'image1')
    IMAGE2 = Parameter('~image2', 'image2')
    USE_FILTER = Parameter('~use_filter', True)

    ...

if __name__ == '__main__':
    my_node()

That's the rosonic way at least! You don't have to care about asserting existence or managing scoping rules. Since they are class fields you have them available all the time. If Parameter is not given a default value nor is the optional argument set, then Parameter checks for existence at load time.

A very slim implementation

rosonic tries to be very slim. There is some complexity regarding class fields. However, it takes 5 minutes to look through the ROS relevant parts. So, see the implementation as the real documentation!