Launching and killing nodes within a Python node in ROS 2 Foxy

Question

I'm in the process of migrating a ROS Melodic python node into a ROS 2 Foxy python node. This particular node acts as the state machine for our software stack. It receives a message from another part of the system and, depending on the message, will launch a set of nodes described in a launch file.

Previously in ROS melodic we handled this with:

    uuid = roslaunch.rlutil.get_or_generate_uuid(None, False)
    roslaunch.configure_logging(uuid)
    LAUNCHED_NODES = roslaunch.parent.ROSLaunchParent(uuid, [full_path])
    LAUNCHED_NODES.start()

where full_path is the absolute path to a launch file.

Then, when certain conditions are met it will kill these nodes with

LAUNCHED_NODES.shutdown()

Is there a way to do this in ROS 2 Foxy within a Python node? The nodes that get launched can't block the original node from running. I've played around with launch_service, but I can't get it to stop blocking the original node from continuing to execute.

Any tips would be greatly appreciated!

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Originally posted by siliconlad on ROS Answers with karma: 11 on 2020-09-07

Post score: 1

Answer 1

So the way I ended up solving this problem is by running the ros2 launch command in a Python subprocess:

launch_process = subprocess.Popen(["ros2", "launch", relative_path_to_launch_file], text=True)

Then to kill the nodes, I can simply run

launch_process.send_signal(SIGINT)
launch_process.wait(timeout=30)

When I posted the question, this wasn't working in Foxy. I think it might've been related to these issues here and here. But it works now. It also works with Galactic.

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Originally posted by siliconlad with karma: 11 on 2021-11-09

This answer was ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 0