Software Overview

Note

For the canonical description of the onboard computers (LPC / APC), their roles and network addresses, see the Platform chapter.

The robot uses ROS 2 Jazzy (on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS), as its system architecture. There are a few main nodes running on the robot:

• bridge_node - node responsible for low-level hardware handling,

• control_node - motion and locomotion control

• state_publisher_node - handles TF messages,

• config_node - global parameter server.

Note

All ROS 2 components (nodes, topics, services, etc.) use namespaces that match the robot name. For example, a Honey Badger robot in the default configuration uses the namespace hb50. The namespace appears as a prefix to all names of the ROS 2 components.

Topics and Messages

The Honey Badger software stack follows a typical ROS 2 architecture where applicable. Certain nodes and topics should be self-explanatory for users who already worked with ROS-based robots.

Topics

Here is a list of relevant topics published by the robot:

Topic	Message Type	QoS	Publish Rate
/hb50/bridge_data	hb50_commons/msg/BridgeData	mabRT	500 hz
/hb50/bridge_state	hb50_commons/msg/BridgeState	mabRT	500 hz
/hb50/bridge_state_10hz	hb50_commons/msg/BridgeState	Reliable	10 hz
/hb50/config_update	std_msgs/msg/String	Reliable	as needed
/hb50/control_command	std_msgs/msg/String	Reliable	as needed
/hb50/hardware_command	hb50_commons/msg/Status	Reliable	as needed
/hb50/heartbeat	hb50_commons/msg/Status	Reliable	1 hz
/hb50/joint_command	hb50_commons/msg/JointCommand	mabRT	500 Hz
/hb50/joint_states	sensor_msgs/msg/JointState	Reliable	10 Hz
/hb50/joy	sensor_msgs/msg/Joy	Reliable	as needed
/hb50/robot_description	std_msgs/msg/String	Reliable	as needed
/hb50/robot_state	hb50_commons/msg/RobotState	mabRT	500 Hz
/hb50/robot_state_10hz	hb50_commons/msg/RobotState	Reliable	10 hz
/hb50/status	hb50_commons/msg/Status	Reliable	as needed
/hb50/velocity_command	geometry_msgs/msg/Twist	mabRT	as needed
/tf	tf2_msgs/msg/TFMessage	Reliable	10 hz
/tf_static	tf2_msgs/msg/TFMessage	Reliable	as needed

Quality of Service

There are two types of QoS used in the robot:

• mabRT - depth: 1, best_effort, durability: volatile;

• Reliable - depth: 10, reliable, durability: volatile;

Messages

The robot uses a mix of built-in ROS 2 messages and custom types defined in the hb50_commons package. For full, canonical field-level documentation of custom messages, see Messages.