ROS Programming: Building Powerful Robots

Step 4 - Implementing plugin loader using calculator_loader.cpp

This plugin loader node loads each plugin and inputs the number to each plugin and fetch's the result from the plugin. We can locate the calculator_loader.cpp file from the chapter_5_codes/pluginlib_calculator/src folder.

Here is the explanation of this code:

#include <boost/shared_ptr.hpp> 
#include <pluginlib/class_loader.h> 
#include <pluginlib_calculator/calculator_base.h> 

These are the necessary header files to load the plugins:

pluginlib::ClassLoader<calculator_base::calc_functions>  calc_loader("pluginlib_calculator",  "calculator_base::calc_functions");

The pluginlib provides the ClassLoader class, which is inside class_loader.h, to load classes in runtime. ...