Is there a way to set the respawn-property at runtime?

edit

Hey!

I have a large robot that runs on about two dozen nodes of which the majority are launched with respawn=true; However, If I want to work on one component, I want to compile and run it on my workstation and not on the robot. To do that, I have to find the corresponding launch-file, change the respawn-parameter and relaunch the whole system.

Is there a way to set this property on the fly? There has to be some watchdog that respawns the nodes and I really would like to be able to set something like a rosparam to decide if I want a node to be respawned or not.