ActionServer and ActionClient ROS Support

[ptiwari0664]

Feature Request: At present Action server and client modules are not supported in the ros unity connection. As a result of this, many manipulator services are not enabled.

[sarah-gibson]

@ptiwari0664 Thank you for this request. It is on our radar and in our backlog.

[scottwillmoore]

For a recent research project, we ended up developing a very simple implementation of a ROS action client. I doubt it is feature complete, or entirely correct but you can find it in our repository: https://github.com/scottwillmoore/fetch_vr. The implementation is in the unity/Assets/Fetch VR/Scripts/Robotics folder.

In case you try to use our implementation, the current messages generated by ROS TCP Connector for ROS actions were not ideal, as the they were not generic, which made it a little more difficult to develop a reusable action client. I ended up using reflection to implement my own feedback/goal/result messages to workaround this issue. It is important to note that this does require manual registration of your action messages as seen in unity/Assets/Fetch VR/Scripts/Extensions/ROSExtensions.cs.

[Ushtarador]

Hello @sarah-gibson, I wanted to ask if there is any progress on the issue, and if you can give any timeline on when the feature would be available? I'm currently using a rather ugly workaround with what is available, and Action Servers would be a much more appropriate solution for us.