How to get a python node in ROS subscribe to multiple topics?

Question

How a ROS node written in Python could subscribe to multiple topics and publish to multiple topics?

All examples I found were for a single topic. Is this an event-driven model so subscription to multiple "events" is allowed or it is more like a loop, so it can listen only to one "source" at a time?

Answer 1

You can follow the example code here and simply add a second subscription like so:

import rospy
from std_msgs.msg import String

def callback1(data):
    rospy.loginfo("Callback1 heard %s",data.data)

def callback2(data):
    rospy.loginfo("Callback2 heard %s",data.data) 

def listener():
    rospy.init_node('node_name')
    rospy.Subscriber("chatter1", String, callback1)
    rospy.Subscriber("chatter2", String, callback2)
    # spin() simply keeps python from exiting until this node is stopped
    rospy.spin()

ROS Python nodes are inherently multi-threaded. When you get each callback, it will be in a separate thread. So this is an event-driven model.

Note that this behavior is different than the default behavior for ROS C nodes which are inherently single threaded unless you specifically make them multi-threaded.