When our system is running, we might have several nodes and many more topics publishing messages among nodes. Also, we might have nodes providing actions or services as well. For large systems, it is important to have tools that let us see what is running at a given time. ROS provides basic but powerful tools with this aim, from the CLI to GUI applications.
In our honest opinion, we will start with the most basic level of introspection. We are going to see how to obtain the list of nodes running and topics and services available at a given time:
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Obtain the list of all |
Command |
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Nodes running |
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Topics of all nodes running |
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Services of all nodes running |
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Parameters on the server |
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We recommend that you go back to Chapter 2, ROS Architecture and Concepts, to see how these commands also allow us to obtain the message type sent by a particular topic as well...