API review

Proposer: John Hsu

Present at review:

• Brian Gerkey

Question / concerns / comments

Enter your thoughts on the API and any questions / concerns you have here. Please sign your name. Anything you want to address in the API review should be marked down here before the start of the meeting.

Stu

Here are some things that are on my todo list for gazebo_actuators:

• gazebo_actuators should read in the robot description from the parameter server
• The fake_model should disappear from gazebo_actuators (huh, is that already gone?)

• I'm thinking about conflating MechanismControl and MechanismControlNode. Do we really need a non-ros-enabled version?

• Maybe GazeboActuators should be named GazeboMechanism?

Tully

• Creating a standard way to document individual plugins would be good.
• It would be nice on the doxygen page to break out the topics by plugin too.
• minor: parameters are set and read not published and subscribed

Brian

• Examples are great!

• full_cloud is a strange name for the stereo camera output. Perhaps something like stereo_cloud?

• It seems that only the battery provides diagnostic information. Should other devices offer diagnostics? On the other hand, it seems a bit strange to offer diagnostics in simulation at all.

• I'd like to see a brief explanation at the beginning of the difference between the mechanism control plugin and the other plugins (i.e., mechanism control is also used with hardware). On a related note, I'd add a linke in thePR2 ROS topics section to the mechanism control plugin, explaining that it's the place to look for other ROS topics and services that are used in a PR2 simulation.

Meeting agenda

To be filled out by proposer based on comments gathered during API review period

Minutes

• Change gazebo_actuators to get robot description from param server instead of from disk. Will require waiting until param is set. (done)

• Rename GazeboActuators to GazeboMechanismControl, to reflect the fact that it's a wrapper around mechanism control. (done)

• Fold XML example into the plugin class page. (done)

• Remove wrist cameras (done)

• Disable diagnostic information in battery. For future tests on error handling. (done)

revision)

• Deferred to a separate naming convention discussion:

  • Change full_cloud to head/stereo/cloud. (Note: location/device_type/data_type) (will not change until major name convention

  • Make a wiki page listing pr2 ROS messages. Move the topic table there, and link to it from the Doxygen.

  • Automatically generate ROS topic name list table (add-on to rosgviz? ken suggested looking at rosconviz).

  • defer ROS topic name changes to separate naming convention discussion (eric).

Conclusion

Package status change (also mark change on PackageStatusDict page)

• Action items that need to be taken.

• Major issues that need to be resolved

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