How do you debug a robot operating system?

2 Use logging and debugging tools

ROS also provides logging and debugging tools that can help you monitor and troubleshoot your code. For example, you can use rosconsole to print log messages from nodes, roslaunch to launch multiple nodes and set parameters, rosrun to run a single node, and rospy or roscpp to write Python or C++ scripts for ROS. You can also use rqt to access a graphical user interface that offers various plugins for visualization, analysis, and debugging, such as rqt_graph , rqt_console , rqt_logger_level , and rqt_bag .

3 Use simulation and testing tools

ROS also provides simulation and testing tools that can help you validate and improve your code. For example, you can use gazebo to simulate physical environments and robots, rviz to visualize sensor data and robot states, rosunit to write and run unit tests for nodes, and rostest to write and run integration tests for launch files. You can also use roslint to check the style and syntax of your code, and rosdoc to generate documentation for your packages.

5 Use best practices

ROS also recommends some best practices that can help you avoid or reduce errors in your code. For example, you should use namespaces and remapping to avoid name conflicts, use message filters and callbacks to handle asynchronous communication, use dynamic reconfigure to change parameters at runtime, use tf to manage coordinate frames and transformations, and use actionlib to implement actions and feedback. You should also follow the ROS conventions and guidelines for naming, coding, packaging, and documenting your projects.

6 Learn from others

ROS also offers many resources that can help you learn from others and improve your skills. For example, you can use the ROS wiki to access tutorials, documentation, and examples, the ROS answers to ask and answer questions, the ROS discourse to join discussions and announcements, and the ROS index to browse and download packages. You can also use the ROS GitHub to view and contribute to the source code, issues, and pull requests of ROS core and community packages.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?