mas_domestic_robotics

Summary

This repository contains various core domestic robotics functionalities developed by the Autonomous Systems group at Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg.

The code in this repository is mostly ROS-based and is developed in a robot-independent manner. Robot-dependent code and/or configuration files are hosted in robot-specific repositories, e.g. mas_cob for our Care-O-bot.

Packages

The functionalities in this repository are organised based on the main capabilities a domestic robot needs to possess. Each of these has its own ROS metapackage, which further includes a set of packages related to that particular functionality. A rough summary of the contents of these packages contents can be found below:

• mdr_navigation - Mapping and autonomous navigation
• mdr_manipulation - Grasp planner
• mdr_hri - Visualization, sound vocalization, graphical user interfaces
• mdr_msgs - ROS messages for all the mas_domestic_robotics packages
• mdr_speech - Speech recognition and NLP
• mdr_perception - Object recognition, people detection and recognition.

Planning

The planning metapackage is where most of the high-level functionalites of our robots are implemented. We are developing our robots as skill-based agents; the planning metapackage includes action and scenario metapackages because of that. The action metapackage is further divided into metapackages for actions related to particular capabilities, while the scenario metapackage includes domain files and/or state machines for various scenarios (e.g. RoboCup@Home tasks, lab demos, and so forth). In principle, scenarios are built by integrating actions together, which is the main benefit of the skill-based agent framework.

Naming Conventions

All packages in our domestic code base start with the mdr_ suffix; this stands for mas_domestic_robotics, which is the name of the top-level directory/ROS metapackage.

Getting started

b-it-bots members can use these instructions to setup a complete development environment for all our robots.

For external users, the following instructions should get you a working system:

1. Setup a catkin workspace

mkdir -p ~/catkin_ws/src && cd ~/catkin_ws
wstool init src
wstool merge -t src https://raw.githubusercontent.com/b-it-bots/mas_domestic_robotics/devel/mas-domestic.rosinstall

2. Get the code and dependencies

  wstool update -t src
  rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src --rosdistro=kinetic -y

3. Building your code

catkin build

Docker images

To test locally, you need to install docker and docker-compose,

You can pull the image for this repository:

docker pull b-it-bots/bitbots-domestic

Building the bitbots-domestic image

To manually build this image, first cd into this repository, then:

docker build -t bitbots-domestic:kinetic .

Travis

To check locally if your changes will pass the tests:

docker-compose build
docker-compose run travis

License

This project is licensed under the GPLv3 License - see the LICENSE.md file for details

Acknowledgments

• Thanks to the many generations of b-it-bots@Home members. You can see a list of contributors here.
• MAS staff and professors who have provided their advice and support