Understanding pluginlib

Plugins are a commonly used term in the computer world. Plugins are modular piece of software which can add a new feature to the existing software application. The advantage of plugins are that we don't need to write all the features in a main software; instead, we can make an infrastructure on the main software to accept new plugins to it. Using this method, we can extend the capabilities of software to any level.

We need plugins for our robotics application too. When we are going to build a complex ROS based application for a robot, plugins will be a good choice to extend the capabilities of the application.

The ROS system provides a plugin framework called pluginlib to dynamically load/unload plugins, which can be a library or class. pluginlib is a set of a C++ library, which helps to write plugins and load/unload whenever we need.

Plugin files are runtime libraries such as shared objects (.so) or dynamic link libraries (.DLL), which is built without linking to...