Creating Your Own Custom ROS Messages

Want to create your own ROS Topic/Service/Action Messages?

Defining your own messages is quite straight forward, but there are a few key rules to follow, and these rules differ slightly depending on whether you are trying to create a standard topic message type, a Service message or an Action. You'll also need to make sure that the CMakeLists.txt and package.xml files within your ROS package contain the correct instructions so that the necessary source code is generated correctly when you run catkin build (i.e. so that you can import the messages into your Python (or C++ etc.) nodes).

Below are some links to some useful external resources that explain how to create each different type of ROS message for your own specific applications:

• Creating ROS Topic and Services Messages (msg and srv)
• Creating ROS Action Messages