ky28059/mini_rover

Boiler Robotics ROS mini rover challenge.

mini_rover

Boiler Robotics ROS mini rover challenge.

To publish cmd_vel data and control the rover, either run

ros2 run mini_rover twist_publisher

to read controller input via pygame or

ros2 run mini_rover twist_publisher_middleman

ros2 run joy joy_node

to use the joy ROS library to subscribe to and publish joystick data. Note that if the joystick was detected, running joy_node should look something like

kevin@ky28059:~$ ros2 run joy joy_node
[INFO] [1694708210.131486648] [joy_node]: No haptic (rumble) available, skipping initialization
[INFO] [1694708210.131830166] [joy_node]: Opened joystick: Core (Plus) Wired Controller.  deadzone: 0.050000

and the topic list should look something like

kevin@ky28059:~$ ros2 topic list
/cmd_vel
/joy
/joy/set_feedback
/parameter_events
/rosout

You can also launch both nodes directly with

ros2 launch mini_rover minirover_launch.py

Running on WSL2

If running on the latest version of WSL, colcon build may fail with setup,py install is deprecated. Downgrade setuptools to 58.2.0 to fix:

pip3 install setuptools==58.2.0

Controller input

To attach a USB device WSL, install the dependencies listed in this tutorial. In powershell, list USB devices with

PS C:\Users\kevin> usbipd wsl list
BUSID  VID:PID    DEVICE                                                        STATE
2-2    046d:c53f  USB Input Device                                              Not attached
2-6    045e:0990  Surface Camera Front, Surface IR Camera Front                 Not attached
2-10   8087:0026  Intel(R) Wireless Bluetooth(R)                                Not attached
3-2    20d6:a711  USB Input Device                                              Not attached
3-4    0bda:8152  Realtek USB FE Family Controller                              Not attached

and attach the desired USB device to the running WSL instance with

usbipd wsl attach --busid <busid>

Within WSL, lsusb should now show the connected device:

kevin@ky28059:~$ lsusb
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 20d6:a711  Core (Plus) Wired Controller
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub

WSL's default kernel does not support input devices (ie. /dev/input does not exist). To circumvent this, you can install a custom kernel image and edit .wslconfig to point to it.

More concretely, download the kotc9 kernel from this link and extract the bzImage, then edit the kernel option in .wslconfig to point to the location of the extracted bzImage; if the image is located at C:\kernel-xpad\bzImage, update C:\Users\<username>\.wslconfig to look something like

[wsl2]
kernel=C:\\kernel-xpad\\bzImage

After a wsl --shutdown, the kernel should be updated and /dev/input should work.

kevin@ky28059:~$ uname -a
Linux ky28059 5.10.102.1-kotc9 #7 SMP Sun Nov 27 15:22:50 +05 2022 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Simulated controller input

To simulate joy publishing from the command line without connecting a controller,

kevin@ky28059:~$ ros2 topic pub /joy sensor_msgs/Joy "axes: [0.0, 1.0, 0.0]"
publisher: beginning loop
publishing #1: sensor_msgs.msg.Joy(header=std_msgs.msg.Header(stamp=builtin_interfaces.msg.Time(sec=0, nanosec=0), frame_id=''), axes=[0.0, 1.0, 0.0], buttons=[])

publishing #2: sensor_msgs.msg.Joy(header=std_msgs.msg.Header(stamp=builtin_interfaces.msg.Time(sec=0, nanosec=0), frame_id=''), axes=[0.0, 1.0, 0.0], buttons=[])

publishing #3: sensor_msgs.msg.Joy(header=std_msgs.msg.Header(stamp=builtin_interfaces.msg.Time(sec=0, nanosec=0), frame_id=''), axes=[0.0, 1.0, 0.0], buttons=[])