Why the timestamp of the message is later than the rosbag time? - ros

I'm debugging my code with rosbag replay. In my code, I did tf transform like this:
tf.transformPose(target_frame, input_pose, output_pose);
Sometimes, there's an exception thrown, which read:
"Lookup would require extrapolation into the future.
Requested time 1484037737.206813097
but the latest data is at time 1484037724.492085834,
when looking up transform from frame [odom] to frame [map]"
I checked in the debugger, and found the time stamp of the message input_pose is later than the rosbag time:
p input_pose.stamp_
$1 sec = 1484037737, nsec = 206813097
p ros::Time::now()
$2 sec = 1484037724, nsec = 918256570
Also, the rosbag play console shows:
[PAUSED] Bag Time: 1484037724.967132
The commands I used to run the rosbag is
rosbag play --clock --pause bagfile.bag
And the param use_sim_time is already set to true:
$rosparam get use_sim_time
true
Could anyone please help with this problem? Thanks!

It looks like you have some tf source publishing at a lower rate. You can debug it looking at tf_monitor or view_frames.
Also, are you waiting for the transform to be ready before doing the transformPose (by using waitForTransform())?

It turns out to be I'm restarting the rosbag play again but the debugging process is not restarted.

Related

The effect of use_sim_time in ROS

I am trying to understand what effects does setting use_sim_time to true does specially when recording and playing a rosbag, but unfortunately the info is few and hard to understand.
I know already how to set it to true, so that is no problem.how to do it
I have done some experiments with a rosbag file I have and I noticed:
When I do rosplay play file.bag , the topic \clock is not published
When I do rosplay play file.bag --clock the topic \clock is published
I also have noticed that when I do rostopic echo \clock and I play the bag, many of the time published is the same! (what does this mean??)
And lastly I have noticed that use_sim_time has no effect on any of these results.
So what effect does setting this parameter to true have?
In order for a ROS node to use simulation time according to the /clock topic, the /use_sim_time parameter must be set to true before the node is initialized. In other words,
The ROS API used to get times ros::Time time = ros::Time::now() will retrieve time data from the /clock topic rather than using the system clock. If you turn use_sim_time off then any time values published to /clock will be ignored
If the /use_sim_time parameter is set, the ROS Time API will return time=0 until it has received a value from the /clock topic. Then, the time will only be updated on receipt of a message from the /clock topic and will stay constant between updates
More information follow: [1], [2]

Rospy message_filter ApproximateTimeSynchronizer issue

I installed ROS melodic version in Ubuntu 18.04.
I'm running a rosbag in the background to mock cameras in messages rostopics.
I set the camera names in rosparams and iterated through it to capture each camera topics.
I'm using message_filter ApproximateTimeSynchronizer to get time synchronized data as mentioned in the official documentation,
http://wiki.ros.org/message_filters
But most of the time the callback function to ApproximateTimeSynchronizer is not being called/is having delay. The code snippet I'm using is given below:
What am I doing wrong here?
def camera_callback(*args):
pass # Other logic comes here
rospy.init_node('my_listener', anonymous=True)
camera_object_data = []
for camera_name in rospy.get_param('/my/cameras'):
camera_object_data.append(message_filters.Subscriber(
'/{}/hd/camera_info'.format(camera_name), CameraInfo))
camera_object_data.append(message_filters.Subscriber(
'/{}/hd/image_color_rect'.format(camera_name), Image))
camera_object_data.append(message_filters.Subscriber(
'/{}/qhd/image_depth_rect'.format(camera_name), Image))
camera_object_data.append(message_filters.Subscriber(
'/{}/qhd/points'.format(camera_name), PointCloud2)
topic_list = [filter_obj for filter_obj in camera_object_data]
ts = message_filters.ApproximateTimeSynchronizer(topic_list, 10, 1, allow_headerless=True)
ts.registerCallback(camera_callback)
rospy.spin()
Looking at your code, it seems correct. There is, however, a trouble with perhaps bad timestamps and ergo this synchronizer as well, see http://wiki.ros.org/message_filters/ApproximateTime for algorithm assumptions.
My recommendation is to write a corresponding node that publishes empty versions of these four msgs all at the same time. If it's still not working in this perfect scenario, there is an issue with the code above. If it is working just fine, then you need to pay attention to the headers.
Given that you have it as a bag file, you can step through the msgs on the command line and observe the timestamps as well. (Can also step within python).
$ rosbag play --pause recorded1.bag # step through msgs by pressing 's'
On time-noisy msgs with small payloads, I've just written a node to listen to all these msgs, and republish them all with the latest time found on any of them (for sync'd logging to csv). Not optimal, but it should reveal where the issue lies.

How to get the current playing time in vlc Lua extension script

I am new writing lua extension for vlc. I have a bare minimal vlc extension that pops a dialog on activating the menu item and logs message to terminal. How to get the current duration of the file which is playing. Looked at this manual https://www.videolan.org/developers/vlc/share/lua/README.txt but did not help.
You could try using the time VLC variable
such as:
function getTimePassed()
return vlc.var.get(vlc.object.input(), "time")
end
And then use it as:
local elapsedDuration = getTimePassed()
local timeAsString = os.date("%H:%M:%S", elapsedDuration)
From the documentation you referenced:
input.item(): Get the current input item. Input item methods are:
:duration(): Get item's duration in seconds or negative value if unavailable.
So, input.item():duration() should give you the duration you are looking for.

LabVIEW and Keithley 2635A - Unable to read data

I'm using LabVIEW and its VISA capabilities to control a Keithley 2635A source meter. Whenever I try to identify the device, it works just fine, both in reading and writing.
viWRITE(*IDN?) /* VISA subVI to send the command to the machine */
viREAD /* VISA subVI to read output */
However, as soon as I set the voltage (or current), it does so. Then I send the command to perform a measurement, but I'm not able to read that data, with the error
VISA: (Hex 0xBFFF0015) Timeout expired before operation completed.
After that, I can not read the *IDN? output either anymore.
The source meter is connected to the PC via a National Instrument GPIB-USB-HS adaptor.
EDIT: I forgot to add, this happens in the VISA Interactive Control program as well.
Ok, apparently the documentation is not very clear. What the smua.measure.X() (where X is the needed parameter) command does is, of course, writing the measurement outcome on a buffer. In order to read that buffer, however, the simple viREAD[] is not sufficient.
So basically the answer was to simply add a print command: this way I have
viWRITE[print(smua.measure.X())];
viREAD[]
And I don't have the error anymore. Not sure why such a command is needed, but that's that. Thank you all for your time answering me.
As #Tom Blodget mentions in the comments, the machine may not have any response to read after you set the voltage. The *IDN? string is both command and query. That is, you will write the command *IDN? and read the result. Some commands do not have any response to read. Here's a quick test to see if you should be reading from the instrument. The following code is in python; I made up the GPIB command to set voltage.
sm = SourceMonitor()
# Prints out IDN
sm.query('*IDN?')
# Prints out current voltage (change this to your actual command)
sm.query('SOUR:VOLT?')
# Set a new voltage
sm.write('SOUR:VOLT 1V')
# Read the new voltage
sm.query('SOUR:VOLT?')
Note that question-marked GPIB commands and the query are used when you expect to get a response from the instrument. The instrument won't give a response for the write command. Query is a combination of write(...) and read(...). If you're using LabView, you may have to write the write and read separately.
If you need verification that the machine received your instruction and acted on it, most instruments have the following common commands:
*OPC? query to see if the operation is complete
SYST:ERR? query to see if any error was generated
Add a question mark ? to the end of the GPIB command used to set the voltage

Why is my Ruby script utilizing 90% of my CPU?

I wrote a admin script that tails a heroku log and every n seconds, it summarizes averages and notifies me if i cross a certain threshold (yes I know and love new relic -- but I want to do custom stuff).
Here is the entire script.
I have never been a master of IO and threads, I wonder if I am making a silly mistake. I have a couple of daemon threads that have while(true){} which could be the culprit. For example:
# read new lines
f = File.open(file, "r")
f.seek(0, IO::SEEK_END)
while true do
select([f])
line = f.gets
parse_heroku_line(line)
end
I use one daemon to watch for new lines of a log, and the other to periodically summarize.
Does someone see a way to make it less processor-intensive?
This probably runs hot because you never really block while reading from the temporary file. IO::select is a thin layer over POSIX select(2). It looks like you're trying to block until the file is ready for reading, but select(2) considers EOF to be ready ("a file descriptor is also ready on end-of-file"), so you always return right away from select then call gets which returns nil at EOF.
You can get a truer EOF reading and nice blocking behavior by avoiding the thread which writes to the temp file and instead using IO::popen to fork the %x[heroku logs --ps router --tail --app pipewave-cedar] log tailer, connected to a ruby IO object on which you can loop over gets, exiting when gets returns nil (indicating the log tailer finished). gets on the pipe from the tailer will block when there's nothing to read and your script will only run as hot as it takes to do your line parsing and reporting.
EDIT: I'm not set up to actually try your code, but you should be able to replace the log tailer thread and your temp file read loop with this code to get the behavior described above:
IO.popen( %w{ heroku logs --ps router --tail --app my-heroku-app } ) do |logf|
while line = logf.gets
parse_heroku_line(line) if line =~ /^/
end
end
I also notice your reporting thread does not do anything to synchronize access to #total_lines, #total_errors, etc. So, you have some minor race conditions where you can get inconsistent values from the instance vars that parse_heroku_line method updates.
select is about whether a read would block. f is just a plain old file, so you when get to the end reads don't block, they just return nil instantly. As a result select returns instantly rather than waiting for something to be appending to the file as I assume you're expecting. Because of this you're sitting in a tight busy loop, so high cpu is to be expected.
If you are at eof (you could either check f.eof? or whether gets returns nil), then you could either start sleeping (perhaps with some sort of back off) or use something like listen to be notified of filesystem changes

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