Software Setup

Depending on your machine, this may take a while.

System Recommendations

It is recommended that you attempt to perform this installation on a device that is running Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic Beaver). In all likelihood, any operating system capable of running ROS Melodic should work, but it should be noted that this software was tested on Ubuntu 18.04. If you do not have Ubuntu installed, you may also be able to install this into a Docker container and run the repository's programs in a reduced capacity. However, please note that you will miss out on the visualization tools unless you configure the X-Server correctly for the Docker container.

Before proceeding on to the next section, make sure that you have ROS Melodic installed on your system. Please also ensure that you have a catkin workspace properly configured. This section will NOT explain how to configure those tools.

Cloning Dependencies

At the time of this edit, the multi-agent-mapping package currently is tested with explore_lite and multirobot_map_merge. Unfortunately, the melodic versions of these packages are not available through an apt repository, but they are available on Github. Therefore, to install these packages, simply clone them into your catkin workspace and run the rosdep and catkin_make to build them.

# Make sure you are in the source directory of your catkin workspace.
git clone https://github.com/hrnr/m-explore/tree/melodic-devel
rosdep install explore_lite
rosdep install multirobot_map_merge
cd ..
catkin_make

Both packages will be cloned into the same folder. Do not attempt to rearrange the directory by moving them outside of the m-explore directory. You should be able to run these commands with this configuration, and leaving it this way makes it easier to pull any future changes.

Installing the Test Repository

Now that the m-explore packages are installed into your catkin workspace, the next step is to install the test repository, multi-robot-mapping. This repository does not author any new steps, but help provide a uniform testbed for your work. This process is very similar to that used to install the m-explore packages.

# Make sure you are in the source directory of your catkin workspace.
git clone https://github.com/JDaniel29/Autonomous-Ci-Multi-Agent-Mapping
rosdep install multi-agent-mapping
cd ..
catkin_make

Test Installation

If you want to test that your setup is correct, or see a preview of the testing environment, simply launch the multi-agent-mapping.launch file using roslaunch and wait for Gazebo to open. The goal is for Gazebo to open with the turtlebot_house environment, as well as with three functioning turtlebots. You can use the rqt-graph tool to confirm this functionality also.

# In Terminal A
roslaunch multi-agent-mapping multi-agent-mapping.launch

# In Terminal B
rqt_graph

Your graph should look like this!