Turning TurtleBot3 into CubeSpawn
This is a preliminary prototype of the simulation environment hacked out of the very nicely built TurtleBot3 packages over at https://github.com/ROBOTIS-GIT
Before installing this I'd suggest installing ROS kinetic as described here: http://emanual.robotis.com/docs/en/platform/turtlebot3/pc_setup
Or the full official install, here: http://wiki.ros.org/kinetic/Installation/Ubuntu
Note: if you do this, I'd suggest still adding the ROBOTIS install up to the point of cloning thier packages so that no core resources are missing. or the full official install, here: http://wiki.ros.org/kinetic/Installation/Ubuntu
Note: I'm running on Ubuntu LTS 16.04 with ROS Kinetic. If you run on a different platform, godspeed and best-o-luck, I dunno about that.
The nice thing about the ROBOTIS instructions is they cover several configuration issues as well as the mechanics of the installation.
All credit to them for skillfully providing this first step!
This is parts of 3 tb packages, which it is hoped can be folded into a single metapackage for CubeSpawn I left it intact to the degree there is a Turtlebot 3 still in it for now, until I master the concepts of feeding signals from a keyboard or other sources for dynamic interaction with the CubeSpawn centric robots.
After getting your ROS install in place with the instruction above.
Clone the CubeSpawn test packages:
$ cd ~/catkin_ws/src
$ git clone https://github.com/CubeSpawn/cs_tb_prototype.git
Since this was 3 folders, it still is, meaning you'll need to copy the folders from the cloned folder up one level.
All the steps to do this have been encapsulated into a (primitive) shell script
Its assumed you are still at ~/catkin_ws/src
$ cd ~/catkin_ws/src/cs_tb_prototype
$ ./setup.sh
If you install the ROBOTIS script mentioned above it adds a several aliases to your ~/.bashrc allowing you to type a bunch of 2 letter commands to do things
Such as 'sb' instead of "source ~/.bashrc" (NOTE this is needed EACH time you open a new terminal)
and 'cm' instead of "cd ~/catkin_ws && catkin_make"... you get the idea! Note: to see the other aliases by the ROBOTIS script $ cat ~/.bashrc
These folders were copied from a live install.
They were at ~/catkin_ws/src/
To compile any changes $ ~catkin_ws/src$ cd ~/catkin_ws && catkin_make (or, if you installed from the ROBOTIS instructions above, the alias "cm")
There is also a test environment for just Gazebo consisting of 2 world files in a terminal. cd to: ~/catkin/ws/src/cs_array/world and run $ gazebo test.world or $ gazebo cs_array.world
These are both static models, but you can tweak setting and save them, getting insight into the XML for various settings and controls.
To run the actual robot environment:
Terminal 1 $ roscore
Terminal 2 $ roslaunch cs_turtlebot3_gazebo turtlebot3_world.launch
Terminal 3 $ roslaunch cs_turtlebot3_gazebo turtlebot3_gazebo_rviz.launch
Terminal 4 $ roslaunch cs_turtlebot3_teleop cs_turtlebot3_teleop_key.launch
I have the installation duplicated on 4 machines on the same network segment and use a software KVM (synergy) to map the desktops into one work environment, this allows for running each terminal on its own screen.
footnotes:
the following was collapsed into the "setup.sh" mentioned above ################################################################################################## i.e.
cd cs_tb_prototype
mv * ..
cd ..
rm -fdr cs_tb_prototype
This also nukes the hidden .git folder, but you don't need it, (unless you need it! for something else, but I dunno what!), my dev env and this are seperated. ##################################################################################################