Software Setup

Software Requirements

Currently, software for both projects is being developed on Ubuntu 18.04 64-bit and ROS Melodic.

ROS Packages Synapse

hector_slam:

roslaunch hector_slam_launch tutorial.launch

Further information can be found at the hector_slam Github and the ROS Wiki:

https://github.com/tu-darmstadt-ros-pkg/hector_slam

http://wiki.ros.org/hector_slam

rplidar_ros:

roslaunch rplidar_ros rplidar.launch

RPLIDAR is a low-cost LIDAR sensor suitable for indoor robotic SLAM applications. It provides 360 degree scan field, 5.5hz/10hz rotating frequency with guaranteed 8 meter ranger distance, currently more than 16m for A2, and 25m for A3. By means of the high-speed image processing engine designed by RoboPeak, the whole cost is reduced greatly, RPLIDAR is the ideal sensor in cost-sensitive areas like robots consumer and hardware hobbyist.

Published Topics

The published topics differ according to the device and parameters. The following list of topics will be available:

scan (sensor_msgs/LaserScan)
stop_motor (std_srvs/Empty)
start_motor (std_srvs/Empty
serial_port (string, default: /dev/ttyUSB0)
serial_baudrate (int, default: 115200)
frame_id (string, default: laser_frame)
inverted (bool, default: false)
angle_compensate (bool, default: false)
scan_mode (string, default: std::string())

Further information can be found at the rplidar_ros Github:

http://wiki.ros.org/rplidar

realsense-ros:

These are packages for using Intel RealSense cameras (D400 series SR300 camera and T265 Tracking Module) with ROS. To start the camera node in ROS:

roslaunch realsense2_camera rs_camera.launch filters:=pointcloud enable_infra1:=false enable_infra2:=false

This will stream all camera sensors and publish them on the appropriate ROS topics.

Other stream resolutions and frame rates can optionally be provided as parameters to the 'rs_camera.launch' file.

Published Topics

The published topics differ according to the device and parameters. After running the above command with D435i attached, the following list of topics will be available (This is a partial list. For full one type rostopic list):

/camera/color/camera_info
/camera/color/image_raw
/camera/depth/camera_info
/camera/depth/image_rect_raw
/camera/extrinsics/depth_to_color
/camera/extrinsics/depth_to_infra1
/camera/extrinsics/depth_to_infra2
/camera/infra1/camera_info
/camera/infra1/image_rect_raw
/camera/infra2/camera_info
/camera/infra2/image_rect_raw
/camera/gyro/imu_info
/camera/gyro/sample
/camera/accel/imu_info
/camera/accel/sample
/diagnostics

The tags on the realsense launch file are for the amount of data attempting to run over the current connection causes errors. This removes the infrared data we don't need at the moment to make sure that the data we need is properly transmitting.

Further information can be found at the RealSense Github:

Babel Development Stack (Fall 2021)

The software to run Milieu Babel was started from the ground up this semester with a fresh copy of Ubuntu Bionic Beaver 18.04 installed on the Seeed Odyssey computer.

The computer was named sapling and the admin password in lab for signing in and running sudo commands in the terminal.

ROS Melodic was reinstalled from here:

http://wiki.ros.org/melodic/Installation/Ubuntu

From here, Arduino IDE was installed to utilize the built-in Arduino board of the Seeed for handling the serial connections to the Sabertooth Motor Controller.

The Sabertooth Motor Controller has its own Arduino library to download. That can be found here:

From this point a number of ROS tutorials can be ran to understand the rosserial connection and the drive commands in Arduino library code. The code that the team tested with this semester is available in the project gihub repo https://github.com/nkilbar/Babel-Development. Results are presented on the next page.

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