Traxter Software Repository

This is a repository for TIR-ANT's (Tracked Inspired Robot Autonomous Navigation Tool) source-code.

The TIR-ANT is a tracked mobile robot with Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM) capabilities. It is a Ubuntu Jammy, ROS2-Humble based robot. The robot's main hardware specifications are:

Raspberry Pi 4B 8GB
Adafruit BNO055 absolute orientation IMU
Intel RealSense D435
Hokuyo URG-04LX-UG01 2D laser rangefinder
ESP32 DevKit-C

The name of the repository is an homage to the donor robot who donated its locomotion apparatus so that the TIR-ANT could be built, the Traxter robot.

Branches

This repository contains four branches:

The tirant branches are the ones compatible with the robot itself and can run on it.
The workstation branches are the ones that should run on the user's workstation. The main difference between these branches and the tirant ones is the inclusion of the gazebo-based simulation packages which are not compatible with the Raspberry Pi 4B's chip architecture.
The branches with -stable in their name are branches which only thoroughly tested code can be pushed to.
The -dev branches are for code testing and prototyping.

Installation

These packages should be downloaded to a ROS2 Humble workspace in a src folder. The necessary dependencies should be installed by running the following command on the workspace's root directory:
rosdep install --from-paths src -y --ignore-src

However, managing dependencies is usually not as simple as running one single command. For sanity's sake, I listed all the packages installed on the TIR-ANT in here.

Running the Robot

The process of turning on the robot and making it run on a specific setup is explained here.

Authorship and Licences

This work was developed by Francisco Gonçalves to obtain the Master of Science Degree in Mechanical Engineering at Instituto Superior Técnico of Lisbon University.

License to be determined

Media

Videos of the TIR-ANT working are made available on TIR-ANT's Youtube channel.