Difference between revisions of "ROS"

Revision as of 13:48, 18 December 2012

DRAFT

Introduction

Rob Linsalata of WillowGarage has posted a great demo video of ROS running on Gumstix Overo COM and iRobot Create platform. Unfortunately it looks like Rob did not get a chance to write up a full tutorial on what it takes to get ROS running on the Gumstix and iRobot collaboration. So here is how I managed to get ROS Groovy (the latest release as of December 2012) to drive the Create.

Prerequisites

• 1 Development computer running Ubuntu (I used 12.04)
• 1 Gumstix Overo COM with WiFi
• 1 Gumstix Turtlecore Expansion board
• 1 MicroSD Card (4GB or larger recommended)

Installation

Get an operating system

First thing you probably want to do is to install Linaro on an Overo COM. Linaro is a variant of Ubuntu and is designed for embedded application. So follow that link and get a Linaro image flashed into your MicroSD. The next part is where the challenge arises. Willow Garage does not provide ARM binaries. They only provide precompiled packages for your everyday computers running Intel or AMD CPUs. So we have to compile ROS from scratch for ARM architecture. Setting up a cross compilation environment is not a simple task, so I decided to do it natively on an Overo (even it means letting it compile over night).

ROS Native Compilation

1. Get all libraries and tools

   $ sudo apt-get install python-pip build-essential python-yaml cmake subversion wget python-setuptools mercurial git-core python-yaml libapr1-dev libaprutil1-dev libbz2-dev python-dev python-empy python-nose libgtest-dev python-paramiko libboost-all-dev liblog4cxx10-dev pkg-config libqt4-dev qt4-qmake

2. Some of the ROS tools need to come from PIP as I wasn't able to get them through Aptitude

   $ pip install rospkg rosdep rosinstall catkin-pkg wstool

3. Not sure what the following two lines do

   $ sudo rosdep init

   $ rosdep update

4. Now we create a catkin workspace and initialize to build core ROS packages

   $ mkdir -p ~/ros_core_ws

   $ cd ~/ros_core_ws

   $ wstool init src https://raw.github.com/gist/4129582/e8889c0fc3af2f95892190e0fabc2bd535208355/base.rosinstall

5. Build catkin and install it. catkin is the low-level build system of ROS

   $ ./src/catkin/bin/catkin_make

   $ ./src/catkin/bin/catkin_make install

6. Setup catkin build environment

   $ source ~/ros_core_ws/install/setup.bash

7. Now we create and initialize a workspace to put all our ROS packages

   $ mkdir ~/ros

   $ cd ~/ros

   $ rosws init . ~/ros_core_ws/install/

8. Current ROS distribution does not recognize Linaro. We have to patch the os detection file.

   $ vim /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/rospkg/os_detect.py

9. Add the following bold faced changes

   OS_UBUNTU='ubuntu'

   OS_LINARO='linaro

   ' OsDetect.register_default(OS_UBUNTU, LsbDetect("Ubuntu"))

   OsDetect.register_default(OS_UBUNTU, LsbDetect("Linaro"))

10. There are a couple dependencies required before we can compile iRobot's Create ROS package

    $ roslocate info kdl > kdl.rosinstall

    $ rosws merge kdl.rosinstall

    $ rosws update

    $ rosdep install kdl

    $ rosmake kdl

    $ roslocate info bullet > bullet.rosinstall

    $ rosws merge bullet.rosinstall

    $ rosws update

    $ rosdep install bullet

    $ rosmake bullet

    If the last step fails indicating that a packaged named bullet was not found, try updating dependency map before running rosmake

    $ rosdep update

11. And build geometry package, the last dependency

    $ roslocate info geometry > geometry.rosinstall

12. In the geometry package's rosinstall file, switch the branch name to fuerte_devel. For some reason the default branch does not work.

    $ vim geometry.rosinstall

    //version: tf_rework

    version: fuerte_devel

    $ rosws merge geometry.rosinstall

    $ rosws update

    $ rosdep install geometry

    $ rosmake geometry

13. Finally we can install iRobot's ROS package

    $ roslocate info irobot_create_2_1 > irobot_create_2_1.rosinstall

    $ vim irobot_create_2_1.rosinstall

    $ rosws merge irobot_create_2_1

    $ rosws update

    $ rosmake irobot_create_2_1

Running ROS

1. We have everything in place to drive the Create around. To start the core services of ROS, do the following:

   $ roscore

2. The iRobot Create is connected to ttyO0 on Gumstix Turtlecore. So make the change:

   $ rosparam set /brown/irobot_create_2_1/port /dev/ttyO0

3. Now we can start the driver program in another terminal:

   $ rosrun irobot_create_2_1 driver.py

4. Again, in a new terminal while roscore and the driver program are running, you can do the following to make the Create roll forward!!:

   $ rosservice call /tank 1 100 100 && sleep 0.5 && rosservice call /brake 1