New robotino architecture

[ipa-nhg]

• robotino
  • System: TinyCore Linux 14.04 - ROS Indigo
  • IP WiFi: 192.168.8.10 (fixed IP)
  • IP cable: 192.168.2.10
  • NTP/NFS client
  • ROS_MASTER
  • Components:
    • Wheels (controller, odom, tmux...)
    • Arm
    • Hand with sensors
    • Hokuyo
• scrat
  • System: Ubuntu desktop/server 14.04 - ROS Indigo
  • IP cable: 192.168.2.11
  • NTP/NFS server
  • Components:
    • camera
    • board control (head, pan-tilt neck and door, leds)
• raspberrypi
  • System: Raspberry ????
  • IP cable: 192.168.2.12
  • NTP client
  • Components:
    • screen
    • sound

[ipa-nhg]

@bajo please help me to complete the summary of the new architecture.

[bajo]

@ipa-nhg I just put in a few of the things I know for sure. I'll update the rest when I am back with the robot.

[ipa-nhg]

Done, but keep the issue open as information

[bajo]

@ipa-nhg We might want/need to change the network layout a little bit.
During the integration week we could not receive data from robotino/raspberry as they are now only in the 192.168.8.1/24 network. Even when we do NAT to let them access the outside network we have the issue that an external pc (eg. my laptop) is not able to ping or access one of them. This is as we know a problem for ROS. Do you think we could solve this by putting scrat into bridge mode? This would connect the wifi and the ethernet connections on the same network and should enable flawless ROS data transfer.

[ipa-nhg]

I believe your problem is the connection between an external pc (your laptop) and the robotino or the raspberry computer (?) yes, bridge the scrat and define static the routes could be a solution.

From my point of view the most important connection is between the slaves and the master (robotino/raspberry with the scrat) and this configuration has to be static (/etc/network/interfaces with a static address and all the hosts defined in /etc/hosts), if this is the case the configuration of the other scrat interfaces should not affect, than feel free to try different types of connections.

comment, ignore if not useful for this case Your objective should be have all the pcs the robot-pcs and your external pcs on the same network, and the best way to do that is use a router to manage the system. Probably you can use the scrat as router but then I recommend use a linux software to manage all the needed functions. Unfortunately I only have experience with Zentyal that is more focused on Servers configuration, but probably you can find something similar for routers.

[bajo]

The connection between all computers on the robot is working fine.
We also want to be able to have at least one computer for visualization and as long as robotino and raspberrypi are not in a bridged network data they send is not available on the visualization pc (eg. laser data).
I'll check how the routing needs to be to make sure all computers on the robot can be online as well.

[mzillich]

@ipa-nhg @bajo Who is taking care of this now?
Note that in the STRANDS project we had a setup with 3 PCs on the robot, and rviz runnig fine on an external PC. Should we look in that robot and copy the solution?