SMART 2

Table of Contents

1. About The Project
2. Getting Started
   • Prerequisites
   • Installation
3. Usage
4. Roadmap
5. Contributing
6. License
7. Contact
8. Acknowledgments

About the project

Repository for SMART 2.0 robot, a platform build on top of iRobot create robot, running ROS in a x64 Intel NUC computer, ADIS IMU and other sensors

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Getting Started

The code was tested in Ubuntu 18.04 and Ubuntu 20.04 and ROS Melodic and Noetic

Prerequisites

For instructions installing ROS: http://wiki.ros.org/noetic/Installation/Ubuntu

For running the MAE493 course code matlab is necessary.

Install usb camera and create dependencies:

 sudo apt-get install ros-melodic-libcreate ros-melodic-usb-cam

Installing ssh server is usefull for accessing the robot computer for running and monitoring the code.

sudo apt-get install openssh-server

Installation

1. Add user to the dialout group for serial communication with the different sensors and resart the computer y

 $ usermod -a -G dialout MY_USER_NAME

2. Create a ROS workspace and go to the src directory

  mkdir my_smart_ws
  mkdir my_smart_ws/src
  cd my_smart_ws/src

2. Clone the robot repo and the SLAM repo

   git clone https://github.com/wvu-irl/smart-2

3. Build the repository

   cd ..
   catkin build

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Usage

This repository contains for running the SMART robot both in a ROS only system or . This code also support multi robot operation.

1. The following launch file is used to start the base hardware for each robot

roslaunch smart2_bring_up smart_2.launch

Matlab

Examples of interfacing ROS and matlab and example code for this robot are under the smart2_ros_brige folder.

ROS

Multi Robot

Namespaces changes under the launch smart2_bring_up/smart2.launch file, ca_driver/config/default.yaml file, and smart_board/hw_interface/config/SMART_Board_Serial_launch_params.yaml are needed for running multiple robots at the same time (TODO, add args to change in only one place)

For running multiple robots under a single rosmaster environment variables are needed to be set. (see:http://wiki.ros.org/ROS/EnvironmentVariables) ROS_MASTER_URI must be set to the ip of the computer running as master and in each robot computer the ROS_HOSTNAME to the ip address of the local network they are connected to.

Roadmap

• ( ) Fix the namespaces for changing the robot name only in one place for multirobot use (currently need to change inside hardware workspace and other places).
• ( ) Simplify the process of setting multiple robots in the network.
• ( ) Integrate with ROS Navigation and ROS localization package.
• ( ) FIx hardware_interface package name and plugins to not yield warning message.

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Contributing

Contribution to the project are greatly appreciated. You can contribute by forking the repository or by creating an issue with suggestions/

1. Fork the Project
2. Create your Branch (git checkout -b MyBranch)
3. Commit your Changes (git commit -m 'Added some new feature')
4. Push to the Branch (git push origin MyBranch)
5. Open a Pull Request

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License

Distributed under the MIT License. See LICENSE.txt for more information.

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Contact

Chris Tatsch [email protected]

Yu Gu [email protected]

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Acknowledgements

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