WSL2 ROS Bridge
A quick-and-dirty package that allows for one to connect two rosbridge servers together, essentially merging two separate roscores for whatever topics you configure. This is essentially a naughty version of actual ROS networking, but this option allows for WSL2 (and Docker w/ the WSL2 backend) to get involved without needing to forward 65000 ports.
Dependencies
Both the WSL2 instance and the remote machine should have:
- A ROS installation
sudo apt-get install -y ros-[version]-rosbridge-server
WSL2 specifically needs:
python3 -m pip install roslibpy
I used ROS Noetic so python3 is listed, but you shouldn't have any troubles switching to Python2 or another version of ROS1.
Usage
First, create a CSV file to configure the topics you'd like to send. The example connections.csv serves as a template:
Topic,Msg Type,Direction
/chatter,std_msgs/String,b-to-a
Please include the header row as well. The options for "Direction" are either a-to-b or b-to-a. a-to-b means "host to remote", i.e. "WSL2 to remote machine"; vice versa for b-to-a.
From here you can run on the remote machine:
roslaunch rosbridge_server rosbridge_websocket.launch port:=[some_port]
And afterwards on the WSL2:
roslaunch wsl2_ros_bridge connect.launch remote_host:=[some_address] remote_port:=[some_port] local_port:=[some_port] connections_file:=[path]
The port arguments are optional and will default to 9090 if not specified.
Known Issues
If anything has been configured incorrectly, or perhaps the remote rosbridge_websocket is not running, then a lot of errors will print out. roslibpy is pretty spammy.
Known Limitations
Have not added support for sending TFs yet. Feel free to open a PR.