How much has to be explicitly exposed via @tool

[igillespie]

Hi, I'm new to ROSA and langchain. I have built the open source rover and I've been playing around controlling my rover using ROSA.

I wrote a couple of custom nodes before I started with ROSA. One is move_distance which makes the robot move a passed in distance linearly. I also implemented a turn_in_place command that will rotate the rover x degrees left or right. I exposed these with @tool in my simple ROSA agent:

@tool
def rotate(degrees: float) -> str:
    """
    Rotate the robot in place.

    :param distance: The angle in degrees to rotate the robot. Negative values are clockwise (to the right) and positive values are counter clockwise.
    :return: A message confirming the movement.
    """
    msg = TurnCommand()
    msg.angle_degrees = degrees
    turn_in_place_publisher.publish(msg)
    time.sleep(1.0)

    return 'Robot turned to its new heading'

This works well, but I was playing with the chat agent and we had this dialog:

Enter your command: do you know how big you are?
ROSA response: I currently don't have specific information about my dimensions or size. If you need to know my size, I can check for any relevant parameters or information. Would you like me to do that?
Enter your command: yes
Node not found

This got me wondering if I can just expose common nodes from the ROS2 system that it can automatically integrate with. I assume there is maybe a way to do this? For example, I have /battery_state the publishes information about the battery. Is there a way to tell the ROSA agent about this without explicitly writing a @tool function that returns the battery info?