publishing on rostopics

Question

I want to publish via terminal a particular message format - sensor_msgs/Joy. However, every format I use seems to be wrong and I cannot understand how it is meant to be written on the terminal. On the internet all I can find is the generic structure and examples of similar messages but modifying my message based on that does not seem to produce any result. Say I want to publish that the object moves forward along a single axis while no motion in others. How do I achieve that with the proper syntax.

Also if you can let me know a place where I can find examples of the exact way I have to publish certain messages via terminal using rostopic pub.

Answer 1

To answer your question, you can use the following syntax to publish something to the joy node:

rostopic pub /joy sensor_msgs/Joy '{ header: {seq: 10, stamp: {secs: 1431222430, nsecs: 345678}, frame_id: "3"}, axes: [1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0], buttons: [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0]}'

Feel free to modify the axis and button values as you need, as well as the header. Axis values go from -1.0 to 1.0 and buttons are either 0 or 1.

For future reference, I would strongly recommend actually writing a publisher script, either in Python or C++, because the rostopic pub interface, while it works okay for some simple std_msgs messages, can get quite tedious for more complicated messages. You might be able to find better tutorials online, but the simplest interface to publish to a joystick topic from C++ would look like this.

sensor_msgs::Joy joy_msg;
joy_msg.axes.push_back(1.0); // Left Horizontal (-1.0 through 1.0)
joy_msg.axes.push_back(0.0); // Left Vertical 
joy_msg.axes.push_back(0.0); // Left Trigger
joy_msg.axes.push_back(0.0); // Right Horizontal
joy_msg.axes.push_back(0.0); // Right Vertical
joy_msg.axes.push_back(0.0); // Right Trigger

joy_msg.buttons.push_back(0);  
// Repeat for all buttons

pub.publish(joy_msg);