Only released in EOL distros:   electric

The Basics

This client library allows to write ROS nodes in the Lua programming language. It allows to publish and subscribe to topics, to provide and use services, interact with ROS masters, slaves and param servers, and provides general utilities for time and duration handling, and logging.

You can find the newest version at http://github.com/timn/roslua.

It does most likely not contain all the features roscpp and rospy can offer. It does not aim to replace any of these, rather it provides an option for situations where Lua might be more suitable or more desirable, e.g. on constrained systems or for behavior description and programming.

The implementation is written purely in Lua, with some functionality coming from external Lua modules written in Lua and C (close-to-operating-system functionality like network transmissions and unpacking of data of the TCPROS protocol, XML parsing, HTTP web server etc.).

Notable differences

There are some differences from client libraries written in and for other languages that are noteworthy.

No offline code generation is necessary for message and service description files, i.e. the message and service code generation steps of the build system will not produce any output for Lua. roslua directly reads the definition files at run-time and creates the appropriate representations at run-time. Since these specifications are read only once on startup when the topics or services are registered, the overhead is negligible and only occurs during initialization of the node.

Lua is inherently single-threaded. There is only so-called cooperative multi-threading in the form of coroutines, which is not used for this implementation. The most notable drawback is that long message processing steps influence the whole program, including processing incoming messages and XML-RPC requests. This can pose a problem to certain programs and node writers should be aware of this. It also allows for the simplicity and briefness of the code, since many constructs like locking are unnecessary.

How to use

For information about requirements and how to get started please read the README file in the package. In the package's doc directory you find auto-generated API documentation. Volunteers are welcome to help out with tutorials.

Full API documentation is available at http://timn.github.com/roslua/.