What is rostweet for?

Rostweet is a twitter client for ROS. It allows your robots to send tweets to its followers, and to receive tweets from its following contacts. Rostweet can be applied in many different ways, these are some examples:

• Communicating progress. Robots running ROS can use rostweet for reporting feedback: task progress, failure detection, etc.
• Sharing new knowledge. After acquiring new information, a robot can use rostweet in order to share it with its followers, e.g. how to grasp an object, a new environment map, a learnt task, etc.
• Acquiring new knowledge. By listening to the others’ tweets, a new source of incoming information is created and can be used for enlarging the robot knowledge.
• Just fun! Let your robot read your tweets, send you a picture, etc.

In general, rostweet can be useful for instantaneous and decentralized robot-robot, robot-human and human-robot sharing of information. Just create a twitter account for your robot and start following other robots (or humans!).

Installation and usage

Rostweet is delivered as a ROS stack. It can be downloaded from the uji-ros-pkg google code project repository:

$ svn co http://uji-ros-pkg.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/rostweet

After downloading and placing it in a folder inside your ROS_PACKAGE_PATH, it should compile with:

$ rosmake rostweet

and run with:

$ rosrun rostweet rostweet

This will ask for a twitter username and password and start the node afterwards (by running the node for the first time, you implicitly accept rostweet as a twitter application in your account, and allow it to read your timeline and publish tweets). Once the node is running, other nodes can subscribe to incoming tweets at /rostweet/incomingTweet (of type rostweet_msgs/IncomingTweet), and publish tweets by calling to the service /rostweet/postTweet (of type rostweet_msgs/postTweet). There is an example node for posting e.g.:

View incoming tweets:

$ rostopic echo /rostweet/incomingTweet/tweet

Send a tweet:

$ rosrun rostweet post "Hello world from rostweet"

With rostweet your robots can also share pictures. Use the post executable for an example:

$ rosrun rostweet post "Hello world from rostweet" <path_to_picture>

For now, rostweet only supports the image media type, although support for other types of media can be easily added.

Create a launch file

Without any parameters, each time rostweet is executed, it will ask for username, password, and will get the OAuth tokens. If you want to skip some of these steps, you can set them with the following parameters via rosparam:

• rostweet/user
• rostweet/password
• rostweet/tokenKey
• rostweet/tokenSecret

After the first execution, the username and token keys are stored in a file inside the launch/ folder in YAML format. With it you can easily write a launch file in order to set the parameters automatically:

 <launch>
 <node name="rostweet" pkg="rostweet" type="rostweet" output="screen">
 <rosparam command="load" file="$(find rostweet)/launch/paramFile.yaml" />
 </node>
 </launch>