ROS Programming: Building Powerful Robots

Step 5 - Creating plugin description file: calculator_plugins.xml

After creating the calculator loader code, next we have to describe the list of plugins inside this package in an XML file called the Plugin Description File. The plugin description file contains all the information about the plugins inside a package such as the name of the classes, types of classes and base class, and so on.

The plugin description is an important file for plugin based packages, because it helps the ROS system to automatically discover, load, and reason about the plugin. It also holds information such as the description of the plugin.

The following code shows the plugin description file of our package called calculator_plugins.xml, which is stored along with ...