Clean way to talk to external application (C# To ROS C++ node)?

Hello everyone,

I'm trying to think of a clean way to get a C# script to talk with an external C++ application, (a ROS node). ROS nodes can be launched like any other executable, and I was thinking that maybe I could start the ros node from the C# script and redirect the standard output/input. Ideally I would like Unity to be able to send some data to the ROS node, have it do some ROS stuff, and then have the ROS node send data back to Unity. This is primarily to visualize and interact with some robotics stuff.

Problem with my idea is I don't know where to start. Does anyone have any ideas or alternative suggestions? (Or maybe someone has done something similar and could post an example?)

I am doing this on Linux Unity (as ROS is linux only), so I wasn't sure if the general C# scripting forum was more appropriate or not.

Thank you!

 

You should check out the native plugin (C++) part of the documentation.

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/NativePlugins.html

If you need to hook up with internal events see the low level native plugin description.