spot_driver

spot_driver

This package provides the central ROS 2 interface to interact with Spot.

The primary launchfile in this package is spot_driver.launch.py. Once you've built and sourced your workspace, launch it with:

ros2 launch spot_driver spot_driver.launch.py

• Various driver parameters can be customized using a configuration file -- see spot_ros_example.yaml for reference. To launch the driver with a configuration file, add the launch argument config_file:=path/to/config.yaml. Note that you can specify the hostname, username, and password for login to the robot in this file, or they can alternatively be set in the environment variables SPOT_IP, BOSDYN_CLIENT_USERNAME, and BOSDYN_CLIENT_PASSWORD, respectively.
• To launch the process within a namespace, add the launch argument spot_name:={name}
• To visualize Spot in RViz, add the launch argument launch_rviz:=True. This will automatically generate the appropriate RViz config file for your robot's name using rviz.launch.py.
• To publish point clouds, add the launch argument publish_point_clouds:=True. This is disabled by default.

The Spot driver contains both Python and C++ nodes. Spot's Python SDK is used for many operations. For example, spot_ros2 is the primary node that connects with Spot and creates the ROS 2 action servers and services. Spot's C++ SDK is used in nodes like spot_image_publisher_node to retrieve images from Spot's RGB and depth cameras at close to their native refresh rate of 15 Hz -- something that is not possible using the Python SDK.

Examples

For some examples of using the Spot ROS 2 driver, check out spot_examples.