Hands-On ROS for Robotics Programming

Remote control using ROS topics

In the previous section, you controlled the robot's publishing messages in the /cmd_vel topic using a human interface, the keyboard and the mouse. In this section, you will publish the messages directly using rostopic from the command line. This way, you will become familiar with this relevant topic and the structure of its messages. It is crucial to understand how /cmd_vel works under the hood since you will be using it in many of the advanced examples we'll be covering in the remaining chapters of this book.