Generic MongoDB Logging for ROS
===============================

Autonomous mobile robots produce an astonishing amount of run-time
data during their operation. Data is acquired from sensors and
actuator feedback, processed to extract information, and further
refined as the basis for decision making or parameter estimation. In
today's robot systems, this data is typically volatile. It is
generated, used, and disposed right away. However, some of this data
might be useful later, for example to analyze faults or evaluate the
robot's performance. A system is required to store this data as well
as enable efficient and flexible querying mechanisms.

This package contains the relevant pieces to setup this generic
logging for ROS. It features a generic logger written in Python
capable of logging any topic, and loggers written in C++ written for
specific message types which are known to be large in size or to be
transmitted at a high frequency. This is to cope with Python inherent
overhead and processing limits. You might find that for certain
additional topics you need to write custom fast loggers following a
template of the existing loggers. If you do this for publicly
available message types we'd like to hear about it and maybe include
it in a later release. We are also investigating the possibility to
have generic message introspection in C++ for ROS, which would remedy
this problem.
Additionally, this package includes tools to monitor the logging
process and MongoDB and generate graphs using RRDtool.

For the conceptual background please refer to the paper "A Generic
Robot Database and its Application in Fault Analysis and Performance
Evaluation" by Niemueller et al. [1].
For technical information please refer to the project's website [2].
The ROS wiki page gives more details on how to get started on ROS [3].

[1] http://www.fawkesrobotics.org/publications/2012/robodb-iros2012/
[2] http://www.fawkesrobotics.org/projects/mongodb-log/
[3] http://www.ros.org/wiki/mongodb_log

Installation/Further dependencies
===
There are a couple of additional debian dependencies needed which are not specified through rosdep. You can install them like this:

```sudo apt-get install python-rrdtool python-pymongo```

Run /tf logger separately
===

<pre><code>
$ rosrun mongodb_log mongodb_log_tf -t /tf -m localhost:27017 -n tflogger -c roslog.tf
</code></pre>