Okay, so someone brought up this idea of using ‘tags’ in ROS the other day, like maybe ‘ross tag’ or something similar. Got me thinking about a little project I messed with a while back.
Trying to Get Organized
I had this setup with a bunch of ROS nodes spitting out data. You know how it gets – messages flying everywhere. I thought, wouldn’t it be neat if I could just ‘tag’ certain messages? Like, tag sensor data with ‘raw’ or ‘processed’, or tag commands with ‘high_priority’ or ‘debug’. Seemed like a simple way to filter or track things later.
My first idea was pretty dumb, looking back. I tried stuffing extra info into the message types themselves. Like, making new message types just to add a ‘tag’ field. That got messy real fast. Suddenly I had tons of slightly different message definitions, a real pain to keep track of.
Then I thought, maybe I can use parameters? Like, set a parameter on the node doing the publishing. But that felt clunky too. The tag was related to the message, not necessarily the node itself, right? A node might send different ‘types’ of data.
Hitting a Wall (Sort Of)
So I poked around online, looking for some standard ‘ross tag’ thing. Honestly, didn’t find much that fit what I wanted, which was something simple. Lots of complex stuff, sure, maybe for bigger systems. But for my little robot project? Overkill.
- Tried messing with topic names, like /sensor/camera/raw vs /sensor/camera/processed. That kinda worked, acted like a tag.
- Considered just putting a simple string tag inside the message data itself, if the message type allowed it.
In the end, for that specific little project, I just kinda gave up on the fancy ‘tag’ idea. It felt like I was trying to build this extra layer of organization that the basic ROS tools didn’t easily support out-of-the-box without making things complicated. Using clearer topic names did most of the job anyway.
Sometimes Simple is Better
It reminded me of this other time, totally different project, where we spent weeks building this super complex status reporting system. Different codes, flags, tons of documentation. End of the day, nobody really used half of it. We just needed to know if things were ‘working’ or ‘broken’.
So yeah, that ‘ross tag’ idea. Cool in theory, maybe useful if there’s a built-in, easy way I missed. But forcing it? Felt like adding complexity just for the sake of it. Sometimes just naming things clearly is good enough. Kept things simpler, less stuff to break or maintain. Just my two cents from tinkering around.
