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node outside catkin workspace

asked 2015-09-16 15:15:16 -0600

arennuit gravatar image

Hi everybody,

I have a complex application in which I would like to integrate ROS, so as to make a ros node out of it an be able to send messages, call services...

This application is complex and heavy and would not fit well in a catkin workspace (a silly refactoring would be needed). Actually ROS is not very central in this specific application and thus integrating ROS should not require a heavy reorganisation (such as putting the codebase in a catkin workspace).

Is there a way to integrate ROS in an application outside of the catkin workspace? I guess most complex software willing to integrate ROS have the same issue...

Thanks,

Antoine.

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Interesting... Can I generate the custom messages in a separate package inside catkin and use the generated msg from my complex application?

arennuit gravatar image arennuit  ( 2015-09-17 02:34:56 -0600 )edit

Probably yes. Putting messages into a separate package is the recommended practice, anyway. http://docs.ros.org/api/catkin/html/h... .

joq gravatar image joq  ( 2015-09-17 12:31:03 -0600 )edit

(moved to answer)

William gravatar image William  ( 2015-09-17 12:59:37 -0600 )edit

I converted my comments to an answer.

William gravatar image William  ( 2015-09-17 13:00:45 -0600 )edit

@arennuit can you please provide a sample listener which is outside of catkin workspace ?

babu gravatar image babu  ( 2017-03-13 13:43:15 -0600 )edit

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answered 2015-09-16 15:35:43 -0600

William gravatar image

updated 2015-09-17 13:01:29 -0600

If it is a CMake project you can just find_package(roscpp REQUIRED), find_package(std_msgs REQUIRED), and so on. Then use the resulting _INCLUDE_DIRS and _LIBRARIES CMake variables to integrate it into your project. You'll start to have issues when you want to generate custom messages.

From @arennuit

Interesting... Can I generate the custom messages in a separate package inside catkin and use the generated msg from my complex application?

Sure. The reason the messages need to be generated within a catkin package is that the fully qualified name of messages includes the package they are from. Other than message, service, action, and dynamic reconfigure generation, the rest (I think) can be done outside of a catkin package.

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Asked: 2015-09-16 15:15:16 -0600

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Last updated: Sep 17 '15