Check whether robot has front/rear sonar and how many when publishing sonar data

[ghost]

From reed.at....@gmail.com on April 24, 2013 22:40:58

See http://answers.ros.org/question/60544/how-to-turn-off-pioneer-3dx-rear-sonars-using-rosaria/

Original issue: http://code.google.com/p/amor-ros-pkg/issues/detail?id=7

[ghost]

From raf.berk...@gmail.com on May 01, 2013 23:05:33

Quote ReedHedges @ http://answers.ros.org/question/60544/how-to-turn-off-pioneer-3dx-rear-sonars-using-rosaria/?comment=61853#comment-61853 "It's easy to turn off/on all sonars. You can also effectively disable a specific sonar transducer (and change polling frequency and order) bit this would be more complicated, would you need that too? This would be in addition to omitting data for nonexistant sonars from the 'sonar' topic."

I'm aware of how to turn off/on all sonars. I'm more interested in, indeed, disabling specific sonars, changing polling frequencies, or changing the order of sonars. However, these last two are not of primary concern to me. I was most interested in disabling specific sonars, namely the last eight.

Thus, the main issue is "omitting data for nonexistant sonars from the 'sonar' topic." It would be great to do that entirely through ROS instead of statically changing the property files.

An extra feature would be to dynamically change a specific sonar's properties.

[ghost]

From ReedHed...@gmail.com on May 02, 2013 08:08:58

Do you want to disable the last eight sonar because your robot doesn't have them?

ROSARIA ought to do this automatically, so this bug entry represents this.

You can check your robot's firmware configuration to make sure the rear sonar are disabled there. http://robots.mobilerobots.com/wiki/Robot_Firmware_Configuration

[ghost]

From jksre...@gmail.com on May 06, 2013 10:34:28

Hi all,

ROSARIA gets the number of sonars from Aria library (ArRobot::getNumSonar()), and it seems (according to your fix for the problem) that this information is taken from the param file, exclusively.

Another way to fix this is to have ROSARIA deduce the number of sonars from the robot config packet (ArRobotConfigPacketReader), provided that this is correctly configured in your robot firmware. Raf, could you check your robots firmware config?

Yet another way to fix it would be to modify the behaviour of the ArRobot::getNumSonar() method (patch Aria library).

[RafBerkvens]

Hi all

I haven't seen that I was mentioned in this discussion for a long time. Since it is still an open issue, could someone explain me how I would be able to read the robots firmware config?

Currently, I solve this issue by modifying the param file.

Kind regards
Raf

[jksrecko]

I think you have to download appropriate firmware (you'll only need the bundled upload/config tool), but @reed-adept will know for sure.

[jksrecko]

I've forgot the link to firmware download: http://robots.mobilerobots.com/wiki/All_Software#Microcontroller_Firmware

[RafBerkvens]

Thanks for the information, I'm taking a look at it.

[RafBerkvens]

My firmware seems to mention only one sonar array to be installed:

Sonar1 (array ping sequence 1-8; 0=disable)         12345678
Sonar2 (array ping sequence 1-8; 0=disable)                0
Sonar3 (array ping sequence 1-8; 0=disable)                0
Sonar4 (array ping sequence 1-8; 0=disable)                0