Namespacing Guide

The robot namespacing is important in the environments that operates with multiple robots. There might be cases, where the robots are from different vendors too. In those scenarios namespacing becomes essential.

The namespacing configuration is disabled by default, when a single robot is acquired from us.

If multiple robots are purchased at the same time, then the following steps would have been already configured for the robots. Therefore, there is no need to use the launch arguments that would enable namespacing and add it to the robot’s configuration.

Note

The complete namespacing support is currently only avaiable for MP-400 and partially for MPO-700. The rest will be updated soon.

Convention

By default all the parameter files are configured to support the namespacing “robot1” and if more than one robot is acquired from us (i.e. in a single purchase), then it would be “robot2”, “robot3” and so on.

In the namespacing setup, each frame broadcasted by the TF’s must have the namespace prefix. For example, the odom frame of a robot should be like robot1/odom and for the base link it should be robot1/base_link and so on.

Configuration for Bringup

As partially explained in the Starting with ROS on the Robot, the drivers of the robots can be easily configured and launched with the namespaces.

Kinematics

For the robots with differential kinematics such as the MP-400 and MP-500, it is essential to setup the odom frame id to have a trailing “/” at the beginning of the frame id. For example, the odom must be inputted to /odom and base_link to /base_link.

The similar steps must be adapted to mecanum and the omnidrive kinematics.

Configuration for Mapping

The naming convention for the namespacing has also been adapted for the mapping parameters.

Namespaced configs can be found under ~/your_workspace/your_robot/configs/navigation/namespaced_mapping.yaml

Configuration for Navigation

The navigation parameters for namespacing system is also pre-configured.

Namespaced configs can be found under ~/your_workspace/your_robot/configs/navigation/multi_robot_navigation.yaml

Launch the navigation with the namespacing using the following command from the terminal

ros2 launch neo_mpo_700-2 navigation.launch.py namespace:="robot1" use_multi_robots:=True head_robot:=True params_file:=install/neo_mpo_700-2/share/neo_mpo_700-2/configs/navigation/multi_robot_navigation.yaml

In case if you would like to set the params_file argument to multi_robot_navigation.yaml, then go to ~/your_workspace/your_robot/launch/navigation.launch.py and modify the default value of the LaunchConfiguration pointing to the argument params_file. Then launch using the following command

ros2 launch neo_mpo_700-2 navigation.launch.py namespace:="robot1" use_multi_robots:=True head_robot:=True

Note

Both the use_multi_robots and head_robot parameters needs to be enabled in the cases where there is only one neobotix robot. This enables the necessary namespacing for the nav2 nodes and also starts the map server for providing the necessary map for the navigation.

Attention

Namespacing is optional and if enabled, the parameter set for the Nav2 must be correspondingly updated.

RViz for navigation can be launched with namespacing, for that use the terminal command:

ros2 launch neo_nav2_bringup rviz_launch.py use_namespace:=True namespace:="robot1"

The complete documentation for multi robot setup can be found in Multi Robot Scenario.

Configuration for Docking

Another param file in the arsenal is the namespaced_docking configs.

Namespaced configs can be found under ~/your_workspace/your_robot/configs/navigation/multi_robot_navigation.yaml

More information on the docking can be found here.