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Protocol

The Simple Message (SimpleMessage) protocol defines the message structure between the ROS driver layer and the robot controller itself.

Refer to REP-I0006: Message Structures of the ROS-Industrial Simple Message Protocol for a description of the protocol.

Typed Messages

The message protocol allows for an arbitrary data payload for message and communications types. However, the client/server model requires that both understand the data payload associated with the different message and communications types. The typed message class enforces the data payload structure. The typed message base class provides methods for creating topic, reply, and request messages. If used in both the client and server, the developer need not understand the structure of the data payload. Unfortunately, a typical robot controller cannot use C++ classes, and thus the developer must understand the message protocol and payload data structure in order to parse it on the robot controller side. The documentation on message specific structures can be found in the source header files. For convenience the message structure is also shown here for common message types. For a more detailed example of a typed message structure and how it is used see the following tutorial.

Generic Connections

The simple message utilizes a abstract connection (SmplMsgConnection) interface to send messages to the industrial robot controller. The interface makes two assumptions:

1. The connection is capable of sending raw bytes
2. The data connection has an explicit connect that establishes the connection (and an associated disconnect method). NOTE: For data connections that are connectionless, such as UDP, the connection method can be a NULL operation.

TCP socket connections have been wrapped for in the connection interface. This is the recommended connection type.

Connection Manager and Message Handlers

The Message Manager and Handler (MessageManager and MessageHandler) classes can be used to manage a connection that allows for multiple message types to be handled. The message manager contains a list of message handlers and executed the appropriate handler when a message is received. These classes are particularly useful on robot controllers which may have a limited number of connections available to them.

rosbuild_add_executable(my_exe my_exe.cpp)
target_link_libraries(my_exe simple_message)
OR
target_link_libraries(my_exe simple_message_bswap)

Wireshark Protocol Dissector

A Lua Wireshark dissector plugin for the simple message protocol is available from ros-industrial/packet-simplemessage at GitHub. See the readme for information on how to install it.

Reporting bugs

Use GitHub to report bugs or submit feature requests. [View active issues]