An Odometry Subscriber Node

The Initial Code¶

Having copied the subscriber.py file from your part1_pubsub package, you'll start out with the code discussed here.

Let's look at what we need to change now.

From Simple Subscriber to Odom Subscriber¶

Imports¶

We will generally rely on rclpy and the Node class from the rclpy.node library, for most nodes that we will create, so our first two imports will remain the same.

We won't be working with String type messages any more however, so we need to replace this line in order to import the correct message type. As we know from earlier in Part 2, the /odom topic uses messages of the type nav_msgs/msg/Odometry:

$ ros2 topic info /odom
Type: nav_msgs/msg/Odometry
...

This tells us everything we need to know to construct the Python import statement correctly:

from nav_msgs.msg import Odometry

We'll also need to import a handy function that should already exist as an importable module in your part2_navigation package called tb3_tools:

from part2_navigation.tb3_tools import quaternion_to_euler

As the name suggests, we'll use this to convert the raw orientation values from /odom into their Euler Angle representation.

Info

This module can be found here: part2_navigation/part2_navigation/tb3_tools.py, if you want to have a look.

Change the Class Name¶

Previously our class was called SimpleSubscriber(), change this to something more appropriate now, e.g.: OdomSubscriber():

class OdomSubscriber(Node):

Initialising the Class¶

The structure of this remains largely the same, we just need to modify a few things:

Change the name that is used to register the node on the ROS Network:
```
super().__init__("odom_subscriber")
```

Change the subscription parameters:

self.my_subscriber = self.create_subscription(
    msg_type=Odometry, # (1)!
    topic="odom", # (2)!
    callback=self.msg_callback, 
    qos_profile=10,
)

/odom uses the Odometry message type (as imported above)
The topic name is "odom", of course!

The final thing we'll do inside our class' __init__ method (after we've set up the subscriber) is initialise a counter:
```
self.counter = 0 
```
The reason for this will be explained shortly...

Modifying the Message Callback¶

This is where the changes are a bit more significant:

def msg_subscriber(self, topic_message: Odometry): # (1)!

    pose = topic_data.pose.pose # (2)!

    # (3)!
    pos_x = pose.position.x
    pos_y = pose.position.y
    pos_z = pose.position.z

    roll, pitch, yaw = quaternion_to_euler(pose.orientation) # (4)!

    if self.counter > 10: # (5)!
        self.counter = 0
        self.get_logger().info(
            f"x = {pos_x:.3f} (m), y = ? (m), theta_z = ? (radians)"
        ) # (6)!
    else:
        self.counter += 1

When defining the message callback, modify the type annotation for the topic_message input.
There are two key parts to an odometry message: Pose and Twist.

We're only really interested in the Pose part of the message here, so grab this first.
As we know by now, Pose contains information about both the "position" and "orientation" of the robot, we extract the position values first and assign them to the variables pos_x, pos_y and pos_z.

Position data is provided in meters, so we don't need to do any conversion on this and can use the data directly.
Orientation data is in quaternions, so we convert this by passing it to the quaternion_to_euler function that we imported from tb3_tools earlier.

This function provides us with the orientation of the robot about its 3 principal axes:
- θ_x: "Roll"
- θ_y: "Pitch"
- θ_z: "Yaw"
Here we print out the values that we're interested in to the terminal.

This callback function will execute every time a new message is published to the odom topic, which occurs at a rate of around 20 times per second (20 Hz).
Tip

We can use he ros2 topic hz function to tell us this:
```
$ ros2 topic hz /odom
average rate: 18.358
min: 0.037s max: 0.088s std dev: 0.01444s window: 20
```
That's a lot of messages to be printed to the terminal every second! We therefore use an if statement and a counter to ensure that our print statement only executes for 1 in every 10 topic messages instead.
Task: Continue formatting the print message to display the three odometry values that are relevant to our robot!

Updating "Main"¶

The only thing left to do now is update any relevant parts of the main function to ensure that you are instantiating, spinning and shutting down your node correctly.

← Back to Part 2