Urdf/Launch Storage Location

[stonier]

Generating the appropriate launchers and configurations /etc/ros works for the 'default' turtlebot development process, but I can think of a few use cases where this might get awkward.

• Someone just doing turtlebot simulation on the pc
• Someone who has several turtlebots and wants to quickly move their laptop from one robot to the next while testing.

And having to use sudo for normal development is a bit of a pain.

I still reckon the environment variables are easy, but they fail when it comes to xacros. You really need something to generate a xacro built up from the components there because there is no way to pass arguments into a xacro file. You can use environment variables and launchers to select from one of a few xacro files like this, but once the permutations increase, it is out of control.

Some ideas (just brainstorming, don't take me too seriously):

• Let the user create 'named' configurations under separate folders (e.g. ArmedKobuki, HarmlessCreate)
  • The name sets a variable somewhere which tells turtlebot launchers which configuration directory to use
• Be able to dump configurations in either /etc/ros or ROS_HOME (sudo/non-sudo usage)

Actually, can't think of anything else right now. Be nice to have something very similar to the linux kernel configuration for the robot.

[stonier]

Another idea - instead of hard coding configurations (which I thought broke down with xacros), create a node which will accept some parameters (or arguments), build the xacro and publish on the param server on the fly.