Automatically compress and decompress ROS messages. Usefull to subscribe to large messages over Wifi.
Do you have problem with large messages, such as PointCloud2 or OccupancyGrid when you connect to a remote robot using Wifi? This package is for you.
Let's suppose that you want to compress a message of type PointCloud2 and named /velodyne_points.
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Run topic_compress_server on the robot, or the PC where the large messages are being published.
rosrun topic_compressor topic_compress_server -
On the other PC (the subscriber side) run:
rosrun topic_compressor topic_compress_client _topics:=/velodyne_points -
Note that you can ask pass to the client multiple, comma separated, names of topics.
For each of the specified topics:
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The server will compress the messages and publish a compressed version of it, with the suffix "/compressed". In this case /velodyne_points/compressed
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The client will publish /velodyne_points/decompressed
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Only if another ROS Node is subscribed to /velodyne_points/decompressed, the communication between the server and the client take place. in other words, if no one use the decompressed message, no CPU not network bandwidth is wasted.