Attention: Answers.ros.org is deprecated as of August the 11th, 2023. Please visit robotics.stackexchange.com to ask a new question. This site will remain online in read-only mode during the transition and into the foreseeable future. Selected questions and answers have been migrated, and redirects have been put in place to direct users to the corresponding questions on Robotics Stack Exchange. Additional details are available here.

Revision history [back]

You question is pretty open-ended. I doubt you will get many detailed answers.

Creating your own messages to provide additional information is indeed a reasonable solution to this general type of problem.

This tutorial explains how to create ROS messages of your own.

ROS Answers is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 license.