Welcome

[Martin Riedel]

Hello everyone,

welcome to this SIG and already a big thank you for showing your
interest in the project. The intention of this SIG is to create a
universal ROS-MATLAB communication interface that allows for the
message exchange between ROS components (nodes) and Mathwork's MATLAB.
So far, people have approached this problem in different ways:

1. By introducing an intermediate communication layer (e.g., IPC-
Bridge) or
2. By compiling ROS components against specific MATLAB versions to
natively use the functionality within mex files
3. ...?
(append if needed)

It would be nice if this SIG could decide on an implementation that
becomes the de-facto standard when trying to communicate between ROS
and MATLAB.

I would propose the following agenda:

- List the requirements for such an interface
- Collect all current information on the topic. Categorize current
solutions and determine their Pros/Cons
- Propose MATLAB-ROS Interface
- Implementation
- Testing
- Review, Extend

I'm looking forward to a constructive discussion.
Martin

[Martin Riedel]

In addition to the two mentioned solutions (IPC, and compilation of ROS code against MATLAB version) there is a possible third solution.

3) A possible third solution would be to reimplement the communication functionality of ROS completely within MATLAB (e.g. by copy/pasting)

part of the ROS code (not sure if the license model allows this) and be independent of the ROS Buildsystem in general. In comparison to the previous two, this solution would require an tremendous amount of work to be realized and currently I cannot see how a single person should be able to do this in his/her spare time. However, a big advantage of this solution would be to be independent of the ROS Buildsystem and its (current) restrictions. Out of completeness I wanted to mention this possibility, but considering the work/gain tradeoff this solution does not seem viable to me.