homebreaker-tutorial

This repository contains basic ROS tutorials using the kobuki robot base. You will learn aboout the structure of ROS, the Gazebo simulator, sensors such as LiDAR and high level tools like "robot skills" and state machines.

Installation

First, you must install ROS. This repository was intended for ROS Melodic on Ubuntu 18.04. However, you may be able to make it work on ROS Noetic with Ubuntu 20.04 with some tweaks.

To install ROS, follow this link (make sure to choose the correct ROS distro).

After the installation, create a ROS workspace

mkdir -p tutorial_ws/src

Clone this repository into the src folder and install it's dependencies.

cd tutorial_ws/src
git clone https://github.com/uchile-robotics/homebreaker-tutorial.git
rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src -r -y

Now, add the kobuki repository to the workspace on the src folder

cd tutorial_ws/src
git clone https://github.com/yujinrobot/kobuki_desktop.git
rosinstall . kobuki_desktop/kobuki_simulator.rosinstall

You may need to manually install the ecl library.

sudo apt install ros-melodic-ecl

Compile.

cd tutorial_ws
catkin_make

We recommend you add the following lines to your .bashrc or .zshrc file (if you haven't already), to prevent you from manually sourcing the files every time you open a terminal.

source /opt/ros/melodic/setup.bash
source <path/to/workspace>/devel/setup.bash

Getting started

Simulation

To start the simulation, run the following command on a terminal

roslaunch gazebo_simulation gazebo.launch

This should start Gazebo on a simulated version of the robot inside the Lab's stage, with all it's sensors, like LiDAR, Odometry and webcam.

To learn more about it, follow the tutorials.

Connect to the robot

To use the robot via WiFi, you'll need to follow 2 steps. First, make sure that you are using the same network as the Raspberry Pi 4 onboard (It is probably UChilehomebreakers) and connect via ssh to it. The password is 'kobuki'.

ssh [email protected]

Then, you need to configure your ROS network to be able to visualize topics over the internet. For this, add the following lines to your bashrc file if you use bash or zshrc if you use zsh (don't forget to source the file after updating it).

export ROS_MASTER_URI= http://kobuki.local:11311
export ROS_HOSTNAME= <your-hostname>.local
export ROS_IP= <your-ip>

You can obtain your IP and hostname with the following:

hostname # for the hostname
hostname -I # for the IP

After that you can start the robot using the bringup file, from a terminal in the robot. This will start up the base, LiDAR, camera, and localization.

roslaunch kobuki_bringup kobuki.launch

You can visualize the robot using RViz from your computer with:

roslaunch kobuki_bringup rviz.launch

Direct connection to the base

Note

If you are using the raspberry pi, ignore this section.

Connection to the kobuki base is done via USB. To make it work, you can configure a udev rule to make the base always recognizable to your computer in the port /dev/kobuki.

ls -n /dev | grep kobuki
sudo adduser <your-username> dialout
rosrun kobuki_ftdi create_udev_rules
roscd kobuki_ftdi
make udev

If you don't want to configure an udev rule, you must manually search on which port your kobuki is at. To do so, run the following

ls -l /dev/serial/by-id

You should get an output similar to the one below, where ../../ttyUSB0 means that your kobuki base is connected to the port /dev/ttyUSB0.

$ ~/ total 0
lrwxrwxrwx ... usb-Yujin_Robot_iClebo_Kobuki_kobuki_A907BTNL-if00-port0 -> ../../ttyUSB0

Afterwards, you should modify the device_port parameter in the base.yaml file.

device_port: /your/dev/port
...