Mastering ROS for Robotics Programming - Second Edition

Understanding the rosserial package in ROS

The rosserial package is a set of standardized communication protocols implemented for communicating from ROS to character devices, such as serial ports, and sockets, and vice versa. The rosserial protocol can convert the standard ROS messages and services data types to embedded device equivalent data types. It also implements multi-topic support by multiplexing the serial data from a character device. The serial data is sent as data packets by adding header and tail bytes on the packet. The packet representation is shown next:

Figure 2: rosserial packet representation

The function of each byte follows: ...