uuvsimulator / netcdf_ros

ROS parser node for NetCDF files

NetCDF ROS parser

This package includes ROS services and a parser to allow using data extracted from a NetCDF file (Network Common Data Form) by interpolating the current position of the vehicle in the arrays or point clouds stored in a .nc file.

This allows the use of real or synthetic data sets of large measurement data that cannot be generated with the simulation in runtime. For more information on the NetCDF file format and library, visit their website.

This project took advantage of netCDF software developed by UCAR/Unidata (http://doi.org/10.5065/D6H70CW6).

Purpose of the project

The software is not ready for production use. However, the license conditions of the applicable Open Source licenses allow you to adapt the software to your needs. Before using it in a safety relevant setting, make sure that the software fulfills your requirements and adjust it according to any applicable safety standards (e.g. ISO 26262).

Requirements

Be sure to have followed the installation instructions for ROS and the setup instructions for the catkin workspace here. Optionally, install the UUV Simulator package as well by following the package's instructions. Before running the package, install the dependencies found in the requirements.txt file as follows

cat requirements.txt | xargs -n 1 -L 1 pip install

Other necessary dependencies can be installed as

cd ~/catkin_ws
rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src --rosdistro=kinetic

Example of usage

To generate an sample of .nc data, run

rosrun netcdf_ros_parser generate_nc_test_data

To run the nc_data_server, run the following ROS node

roslaunch netcdf_ros_parser playback_nc_data.launch

To subscribe a vehicle to the server to extract the data at the vehicle's current position, use the following

roslaunch netcdf_ros_parser subscribe_vehicle.launch
  namespace:=<robot_namespace>
  odometry_topic:=<Odometry or NatSatFix topic>
  using_gps:=false
  odometry_reference_frame:=<enu, ned or wgs84>

By doing this, a topic /<robot_namespace>/nc_data will be created where a sensor_msgs/PointCloud message is published with the current position of the vehicle (using the reference frame convention given) with the interpolated variable data stored in each one of the message channels.

License

netcdf_ros is open-sourced under the Apache-2.0 license. See the LICENSE file for details.