XGO Mini 2 - ROS Humble Controller

This is the ROS2 Humble port of the official ROS1 controller provided by the XGO team.

Installation

It's quite tricky with lots of hacks. A big ToDo is to automate and simplify this process. Note that some steps might be inaccurate at this point. So you can create PRs with fixes.

Base image

Flash Ubuntu server 22.04 via RPi-imager

Serial ports and BT configuration

Adjust config.txt:

sudo nano /boot/firmware/config.txt

• Ensure enable_uart=1 is set to enable the UART interface.
• Add dtoverlay=miniuart-bt to ensure Bluetooth uses ttyS0 and leaves ttyAMA0 for general use.

Adjust cmdline.txt:

sudo nano /boot/firmware/cmdline.txt

Remove the section console=serial0,115200.

Serial console

To avoid serial conflicts, disable the console:

sudo systemctl stop [email protected]
sudo systemctl disable [email protected]

Permissions

Add current user to dialout and tty groups:

sudo usermod -a -G dialout,tty $USER

Set udev rules for ttyS0 and ttyAMA0:

sudo nano /etc/udev/rules.d/99-serial.rules

Add the following lines to it:

KERNEL=="ttyAMA0", GROUP="tty,dialout", MODE="0666"
KERNEL=="ttyS0", GROUP="tty,dialout", MODE="0666"

Reload the udev rules:

sudo udevadm control --reload-rules && sudo udevadm trigger

Reboot the Raspberry Pi to ensure all changes are applied:

sudo reboot

After rebooting, you should be able to use ttyAMA0 for serial communication and ttyS0 for Bluetooth without any permission issues. These steps are required to make XGO accept serial commands and control the robot via the BT joystick. Note that assigning BT to `ttyS0`` makes it less stable. And sometimes, you may see random disconnects. But it's better than sacrificing the main serial channel to the less stable port.

Additional dependencies

Note that I haven't tried to replicate every step from scratch yet, so there's a chance I missed some system libraries. But at least the following one have to be installed:

sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y libjsoncpp-dev

ROS2 Humble

Follow the official installation guide to set up Humble (base version). Or you can try automated scripts like this.

Serial communication

ROS2 doesn't support the serial communication library used in lots of ROS1 controllers. So you have to build its catkin-less port manually:

git clone https://github.com/wjwwood/cxx_serial.git && cd cxx_serial
nano Makefile

A hardcoded CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX refers to /tmp dir. To avoid losing the build output after reboot, you have to update a path:

CMAKE_FLAGS := -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local

Then build and install:

make && sudo make install

XGO Mini2 controller

Get sources:

mkdir -p xgo_ws/src && cd xgo_ws/src && git clone -b humble https://github.com/sskorol/xgo_ros.git && cd ../

Ensure you've set up colcon and initialized rosdep:

sudo rosdep init
rosdep update

Install dependencies:

rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src --rosdistro=humble -r -y

Build XGO controller:

colcon build --symlink-install
# Add the following to .zshrc or .bashrc to persist changes
source install/local_setup.zsh # or *.bash, depending on your defaults

Run controller:

ros2 launch xgo2_ros xgo_control_launch.py

For a quick keyboard teleoperation test, run the following commands:

sudo apt install ros-humble-teleop-twist-keyboard
ros2 run teleop_twist_keyboard teleop_twist_keyboard

LD-X series LiDAR

Note that the existing implementation supports LD-X LiDAR launch. So, if you have one connected to the USB-C port, feel free to launch it via use_lidar flag. I found the following driver one of the most professional. However, there's a known bug in all the existing implementations. It appears when you try running slam-toolbox. It seems like there's already a workaround exists. I haven't tried it yet, though.

Known issues and ToDos

• None of the existing teleop nodes allow you to control an arm and body. So, I created a separate node for that. It will be published soon. So stay tuned.
• I also adjusted the visualization by migrating a messy URDF to Xacro format. It still requires some polishing, though.
• Integrate more serial commands like speed control, moving mode, etc. Some of them mentioned in the official docs didn't work for me. I need to contact the owners to get more details.
• Investigate the real limits of all the joints. Sometimes, I can bring XGO to an unrecoverable state. Velocity commands stop working. A robot just stuck in some pose. It might be a partial "deadlock" (some joints might still work).
• Investigate and reproduce system crashes that prevent XGO from shutting down. SSH goes down, and the power button doesn't react on pressing. In this state, we should only wait until the battery dies.
• Find options for a more stable power supply that prevents the battery from draining when the external power supply is connected in active development mode. Unfortunately, XGO can't work forever. And it makes the whole development experience awful.
• IMU data doesn't provide Gyro readings. I'm still confused if it hasn't been implemented yet or if a sensor doesn't support it. On the other hand, Z-readings always give me a constant error (a value is increasing with a constant speed). When I tried to visualize it in RViz, a robot turned around its Z-axis. I'm unsure if it's a sensor issue, magnetic fields' impact, or some other problem. I need to figure that out, as I can't fully rely on IMU data.
• Couldn't make slam-toolbox work due to a mentioned LiDAR issue. I'm going to apply a given patch to see if it helps.
• I still can't make it work with CHAMP. The biggest issue here is in the joint states. By default, this topic contains legs and arm data. However, CHAMP relies on leg data only. It crashes. I've already done some experiments (commenting arm joints / extending CHAMP state estimator). But no luck yet. ToDo: publish gaits, joints, and links based on the XGO characteristics provided to me by its team. I'd likely include these configs in a separate repo with the visualization part, which should run on more powerful hardware than RPi.
• I can't fully make XGO work in Gazebo yet for the same reason. We must split the arm and legs and rely on MoveIt configs (probably) at the end. I'm unsure about the best control plugins for both cases. Note about a great job by MiniPupper team to support ROS2 for their dog. So, I use their code as inspiration in my experiments with XGO.
• Figure out the correct way of publishing odometry data for quadruped robots. The current implementation is just a workaround to build a full tf-tree required for the other steps to SLAM/Nav.
• Polish the code.