Triggering Only Error Messages with ROS 2 service call to /rosbag2_recorder/snapshot

Question

I have been using the ROS 2 rosbag2_recorder package to record message data for analysis and testing purposes. Recently, I've been exploring the possibility of capturing only error messages in my bag files.

I noticed that the /rosbag2_recorder/snapshot service provided by the package allows me to take a snapshot of the ROS 2 system's message data at a particular moment. However, I would like to know if it is possible to configure this service call in a way that it captures only error messages.

I am aware that the rosbag2_interfaces/Snapshot service request message has parameters like topics and max_cache_size, but I couldn't find any specific option or flag related to capturing only error messages.

Could someone please guide me on how I can modify the rosbag2_recorder service call to capture only error messages? Are there any additional parameters or configurations that can be used for this purpose? Or is there an alternative approach to achieve this goal?

details about snapshot: here

Any suggestions, insights, or examples would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance for your help!

Answer 1

Welcome to Robotics, Dragon. You're mentioning wanting to make a rosbag, but then you also mention wanting to "capture error messages." Error messages are logged, and it's not super clear to me what you're trying to do, so my first suggestion would be that you investigate logging options and see if a log file is sufficient for your needs.

If you need to have logs included with your rosbag, you could also add the /rosout_agg topic to be included with your bagfile and you'd have all of the logs included.

If you need only the error messages and you need them included in the bagfile, then you could consider writing a re-publisher that checks the log level from messages published to /rosout_agg and then, if they're at or above ERROR, write them to a new topic like /rosout_errors. Then you can add /rosout_errors to your list of topics for the rosbag recording.

You're mentioning ROS2, which I'm not currently using, but for Python and ROS this would look like the following:

import rospy
from rosgraph_msgs.msg import Log

def callback(data):
    if data.level >= Log.ERROR:
        pub.publish(data)

pub = rospy.Publisher('rosout_errors', Log, queue_size=10)
rospy.init_node('rosout_republisher', anonymous=True)
rospy.Subscriber("rosout_agg", Log, callback)
rospy.spin()

I believe the primary difference you'd have to make here is that in ROS2 the Log message is in rcl_interfaces instead of rosgraph_msgs, but again I don't have ROS2 and can't verify that. The code I posted above works for ROS.