Using Simple Commander API for multi robot systems

[AryanArora12]

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Feature request

Using Simple Commander API for multi robot systems. This is in continuation to this post.

Feature description

I am making a multi-robot simulation and for my purposes, I want to use the Python API to send navigation goals to different robots. As of now, I cannot see how to do that with two robots(that is add a namespace and setting up goal poses as well as set initial poses individually for each robot). Any guidance on how to do this would be helpful.

Implementation considerations

I think the solution proposed in the post mentioned earlier sounds good, if not implemented yet.

[SteveMacenski]

That was outside of the scope of the original "simple" nature of the commander, but it shouldn't be prohibitively difficult to make work and it would be a great contribution back!

I'd add the namespace support and than have a different simple commander object for each of the robots. That should separate them from each other and namespaced by the appropriate services and such.

[AryanArora12]

Cool! I thought about the same thing but was struggling in adding the namespace functionality. I'll work on it over the next few days and provide an update if I get any progress/or am able to implement that successfully.

[SteveMacenski]

I think its mostly just adding the namespace when we create all the clients in the python API's constructor!

OK!

[AryanArora12]

Hey, Thanks for the guidance, I was able to run multiple robots by adding the namespace functionality

[SteveMacenski]

Whoops wrong button. Can you open a PR? Happy to merge it so others can use!

[AryanArora12]

Yeah sure. I'll do a few more tests for sanity check and then open a PR by this week.

[ipa-rar]

@SteveMacenski Can you check this PR #3701

[SteveMacenski]

https://github.com/ros-planning/navigation2/blob/main/nav2_simple_commander/nav2_simple_commander/robot_navigator.py#L50 https://docs.ros2.org/latest/api/rclpy/api/node.html. That might just do everything for us automatically as long as I remove the / in front of the couple of topics it is

[SteveMacenski]

#3803 implements + tested