How to launch ROS nodes and publish custom ROS messages via MATLAB

This is a kinda hackey way to launch ROS nodes inside MATLAB during development, if you don't want to constantly switch to terminal...

Requirements

Please ensure you have configured the following first:

1. Install the ROS Toolbox.

2. Install ROS Custom Message Support through Add-Ons.

3. Build the package inside the catkin_ws folder, e.g. by running catkin build.

4. Follow this guide to generate the messages so that we can populate them in MATLAB. Essentially, you need to run rosgenmsg('custom_msgs'), paste the output lines to javaclassspath.txt, and restart MATLAB.

These steps need to be performed once only.

Afterwards, check the file ros_matlab_example.m for a concrete example, making sure that everything is in MATLAB's PATH before running the script.

Extra notes

• The demonstrated example is a hopper robot where we set a sinusoidal base motion and visualize it in rviz.

• The robot model is included in the xpp package.

• The process was tested on MATLAB R2019b.