ROS Package: ros_kafka_connector

This is a ROS package for subscribing or publishing to topics using Kafka.

Takes a yaml file with {msg_type, ros_topic, kafka_topic}. Can publish the messages between ros and kafka. Put the yaml file in the config/ folder.

Example yaml file in: topics.yaml

robot_name:
    - msg_type: "std_msgs/String"
      ros_topic: "/string"
      kafka_topic: "string"
    - msg_type: "geometry_msgs/Pose"
      ros_topic: "/pose"
      kafka_topic: "pose"

Will find dictionary:

topic_dict: {
    'std_msgs/String': {'/string', 'string'},
    'geometry_msgs/Pose' : {'/pose', 'pose'}
}

Message types that are added are in the utils.py file. To add new message types to the converter, add cases to import_msg_type function. If you have custom messages from ROS, you need to make them callable in your ros workspace.

Parameter	Info	Default
bootstrap_server	IP of kafka server	"localhost:9092"
topics_filename	file name of yaml	"topics.yaml"
update_rate	update publisher rate	"10.0"
robot_name	first line of yaml	"UGV"

installation & running

additional libraries required:

pip install kafka-python pyyaml
sudo apt install ros-noetic-rospy-message-converter

To start publishing kafka topics to ROS:

roslaunch ros_kafka_connector ros_publisher.launch

To start publishing ROS topics to kafka:

roslaunch ros_kafka_connector kafka_publisher.launch