Announcing ros-matlab-bridge, the rosjava approach

[Tingfan Wu]

Hi all,

I am not sure if this group is still active. But I recently releases an implementation of matlab_bridge without writing C-mex files. Instead, I re-packaged some rosjava JAR files and then invoke them directly from matlab.  The result is a easy-to-use cross-platform ros_matlab_bridge.
Please take a look

 http://code.google.com/p/mplab-ros-pkg/wiki/java_matlab_bridge

Comments welcome.

-Tingfan

[Martin Riedel]

Dear Tingfan,

thanks for pointing out your project. I'll give it a try within the next days. To be honest I did not use rosjava in any way yet, so I'm curious on how exactly it works. I'm going to release the "native" approach in a few weeks, but as you already pointed out, the missing windows support is a big drawback.

I'll give you some comments as soon possible.

Martin

[Johannes Meyer]

Hi,

for the sake of completeness I would like to pre-announce my rosmatlab project here, too. I am working on a client library for ROS in Matlab, build on top of roscpp. It is not yet finished, but the current development version can be found here: https://github.com/tu-darmstadt-ros-pkg/rosmatlab.

As Tingfan and the http://www.ros.org/wiki/groovy/Planning/Matlab page also mention, Matlab comes with its own set of libraries, unfortunately without the appropriate headers. But with the new catkin-based buildsystem it only takes a couple of minutes to download the necessary boost headers and download and install fuerte from source (http://www.ros.org/wiki/fuerte/Installation/Ubuntu/Source) into a subfolder of the Matlab root directory with the BOOST_ROOT/BOOST_INCLUDEDIR/BOOST_LIBRARYDIR variables set correctly. Note that due to a bug in the current CMakeLists.txt/rosboost-cfg files of the ROS core libraries it is necessary to rename the system boost include directory while compiling packages for Matlab (see https://code.ros.org/trac/ros/ticket/4052).

rosmatlab installs a shared library and a couple of MEX files. For subscribers, publishers, service clients and servers and bag file handling it is planned to implement an object-oriented interface, but only the ros.Subscriber class is already there. Other Mex files contain conversion functions for ROS messages to and from Matlab structs and double vectors. Additional message types can be added to your project by simply adding add_mex_messages(package) to the project's CMakeLists.txt. Our cpp_introspection package is used in the background to analyze, serialize and deserialize ROS messages without having to include the headers explicitly.

I also plan to finish rosrtw within this year, which will be able to compile standalone ROS nodes and TaskContexts for Orocos Real-Time Toolkit from Simulink models.

I also appreciate any comments!

Johannes

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-- 
Dipl.-Inform. Johannes Meyer
Technische Universität Darmstadt
FB Maschinenbau / Institut für Flugsysteme und Regelungstechnik
Petersenstrasse 30
64287 Darmstadt, Germany

Tel:    +49 6151 / 16-6738
Fax:    +49 6151 / 16-5434
E-Mail: me...@fsr.tu-darmstadt.de
URL:    http://www.fsr.tu-darmstadt.de

[Giampiero Campa]

Hi Johannes and Tingfan, thanks for your contributions. Interesting stuff!

Tingfan, the idea of relying on rosjava was somehow circulating, so it's really great to see that you managed to actually implement it !

Johannes and Martin, as soon as your solutions are available as well, i'll email the links to a list of interested people, which will hopefully bring them in the discussion and generate more interest.

Thanks again
Giampiero