I have 10 turtlebots (version 1, the white one) that I'm trying to operate on a wifi network (g wireless standard). Any three of them together work fine but as soon as I add a fourth the turtlebot_node starts throwing lots of error messages about not being able to read data from the iCreate properly and the system grinds to a halt. I switched it over to a wired network and got all 10 running great with a peak network bandwidth of 9KBps, which isn't really that much. Is there something specific to the turtlebot_node that struggles with message latency or wifi in general?
Right now my alternatives are:
- rewrite the turtlebot_node to make it more tolerant of infrequent message
- combine all the nodes on each turtlebot using nodelets
- reorganize the system as a multi-master network, with one master on each turtlebot
Originally posted by andrewlybarger on ROS Answers with karma: 1 on 2013-06-20
Post score: 0
Original comments
Comment by Rafael on 2013-06-24:
Hi, how are they running in the same network? Are they running independently or they can share topics?
Comment by andrewlybarger on 2013-06-26:
I'm quite certain that it is possible to run 4 or more turtlebots together, the question is does the stock turtlebot_node need to modified or the network/ros configuration. Right now all of the turtlebots are using a single ros master, which is running on my desktop machine.
Comment by Rafael on 2013-06-26:
Thanks Andrew, I have a question setup regarding how to do that single ros master multi-robot config. I would be very grateful if you could please take a look at it and give me an idea of how you got this to work. I tried it with namespaces following a suggestion here but it has been a dead end.
