Recently I needed some ROS code for a four wheel steering controller. Someone has this really neat steering controller package that lets you define a wide varie

Recently I needed some ROS code for a four wheel steering controller. Someone has this really neat steering controller package that lets you define a wide variety of robots and interface them with ROS, and it does nice things like calculate the odom values for you. But I ultimately found that setting up and running ROS was sort of more complex than I needed (I’m running on raspberry pi). I pulled the snippet of C++ from the steering controller that I needed and converted it to python. I use python multiprocessing to launch multiple python files as processes that run independently, and use multiprocessing pipes to communicate between the parent process and the sub processes. I’ve got a whole pure python robot with RTK GPS, four wheel steering, a live server interface, and GPS path-following. It’s all working fine and I haven’t really needed ROS yet. I feel like I never would have learned how to build this software if I hadn’t learned ROS first though. ROS shows you how all the pieces fit together, and after learning that I started to see how to build it from scratch. For simple applications in resource constrained environments there may be times where building it from scratch is easier. I sure am glad that ROS code and steering controller were there for me to borrow from though! EDIT: The USB package in TFA looks nice. It’s tricky to run ROS on anything but the exact distro they recommend and this seems to be a useful tool for getting it running quickly without messing with your system.