Basic ROS code for the Stretch Robot

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I’m working on using ROS to do stuff with the Stretch robot, but I"m a bit lost as to how to start. I’ve gone through the ROS tutorials on the ROS website and looked at the hello-robot repository with ROS code for the stretch-robot, although a lot of it seems very complicated and out of my depth.
First, I’m wondering if anyone has any basic examples of using ROS to do stuff with the stretch robot (such as subscribing to topics, movement, etc) that also involve using python scripts. Second of all, are there any stretch-robot specific tutorials involving using ROS that could be helpful - thanks!
Overall, I’m just trying to get off the ground with using ROS for the Stretch robot but I’m not sure where to start.

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Hi @Robot_Lover, welcome to the forum! There is definitely a steep learning curve with ROS, so we have been working on improving the documentation and readability of example code in the stretch_ros repository. All of this example code is written in Python and can be run using ROS commands. I’d be happy to answer any questions you’ve had while reading this code and getting started with Stretch.

Additionally, we will be starting work on a series of ROS tutorials tailored for working with Stretch. We hope these tutorials can give a good starting point to begin learning ROS and working with Stretch. If you are interested in this, please let me know and I will make sure to send you the first tutorial when it is made available.

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I’m super interested in the tutorials for how one can use the stretch robot with ROS.

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In addition, I was wondering if there’s a list of the ROS topics for the stretch robot.

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Great! I will follow up here when the first tutorial is available.

To list the ROS topics available, you may use the rostopic command line tool. For example, the commands could look like:

roslaunch stetch_core stretch_driver.launch
[in a separate terminal]
rostopic list

The roslaunch command line tool will launch the ROS master and StretchBodyNode node, while the rostopic command line tool will print out the active topics at the moment. You may find additional documentation on the rostopic tool on the ROS wiki.