rosbot_mavlink_bridge

ROS 2 bridge that talks MAVLink to the ROSbot firmware and exposes the MCU’s topics and services (ROS_API.md) under the rosbot_mcu node, which the rosbot_ros driver inside rosbot-snap consumes.

Build

The bridge is a regular ament_cmake package and is self-contained — the MAVLink dialect headers it needs are the canonical mavlink_dialect/ tree shipped inside the package. just mavgen (from the repo root) regenerates them in place; the firmware build (PlatformIO) reads from the same directory via its include path. Single source of truth, no duplication.

# from the repo root
colcon build --packages-select rosbot_mavlink_bridge
. install/setup.bash

The CI matrix builds the same source tree against both jazzy and humble containers (see .github/workflows/ci.yaml).

Apt install (rosdistro)

Once released through bloom, the bridge is available as ros-<distro>-rosbot-mavlink-bridge and is pulled in automatically as an exec_depend of rosbot_bringup. Users on apt do not need this repo — the bridge ships alongside rosbot_ros.

Run

ROSbot XL (UDP transport):

ros2 launch rosbot_mavlink_bridge rosbot_xl.launch.py namespace:=rosbot

ROSbot (serial transport — pick the SBC’s SBC<->MCU UART):

ros2 launch rosbot_mavlink_bridge rosbot.launch.py namespace:=rosbot \
  --ros-args -p serial_port:=/dev/ttyS4

The bridge waits for the firmware’s boot banner (rosbot[_xl] <version> mavlink) before declaring itself CONNECTED and publishing telemetry, so a bridge never runs against firmware of another version.

Topics / services

Parameters

See config/rosbot.yaml and config/rosbot_xl.yaml for variants. Key parameters:

• transport: udp

  serial

• peer_ip / peer_port / local_port — UDP only (mavros default ports)
• serial_port / serial_baudrate — serial only
• ros_namespace — prefixed onto every advertised topic/service/node name
• enable_ranges, enable_led_strip — variant gates
• publish_link_state — if true, advertise an extra mcu_link_state std_msgs/UInt8 topic for diagnostics (off by default for API parity)
• timesync_alpha — EWMA factor for the time-offset filter
• expected_banner_regex — boot-banner gate string

Changelog for package rosbot_mavlink_bridge

Forthcoming

• Initial release. Bridge node that translates the firmware's MAVLink wire protocol into the same ROS 2 API the micro-ROS agent exposes, so downstream consumers (e.g. rosbot_ros) see byte-identical topics and services.