Robot Feature Description Format

Changelog

• ci: Add building, testing, prek, and renovatebot (#1)
• feat: rfdf_example_ros2
• feat: Create rfdf_publisher for publishing rfdf files
• chore: Add LICENSE

Feedback from People

I showed the project at the ROSGraph Working Group meeting, and the feedback was incredible!
Emerson Knapp said that this is a problem that Polymath Robotics is facing with its autonomous tractors and needs to be solved.
Natesh Narain said that the project is a good idea and needs more use-case examples to get it evaluated properly.
Tony Baltovski from Clearpath Robotics starred my repo, but I haven’t received any personal feedback from him.

Updates to the project

I have worked on adding a Rust-based ROS 2 node for publishing RFDF descriptions, alongside an example ROS 2 package. They work well.
A special feature of the publisher is that it uses the TRANSIENT_LOCAL QOS policy, similar to the robot_state_publisher. This makes it so that the publisher only publishes messages to a particular node when it is added to the ROS 2 network, and doesn’t continuously publish messages.
I also worked more on CI and stuff.

Changelog

• docs: Create initial website and description of movement features
• build(nix): Add flake.nix
• Initial commit

I have started working on the documentation of the format and have completed documenting how a robot’s movement features should be described.
I am going to present this project in the ROSGraph Working Group meeting next week, let’s hope the response is good.