Initial Software & Simulation

Introduction

In this tutorial, we’ll go over the bare necessities you’ll need on your base computer to run the simulation stack. By doing so, you’ll also have access to the utilities for the project like the default RVIZ configuration file.

Perquisites:

• Ubuntu 18.04 dual booted on your machine or Ubuntu 18.04 installed on WSL2 on your Windows Computer.

  • Note: Instructions to Install WSL2

  • Note: WSL1 will be more difficult to use since you have to setup graphics rendering.

• Python2.7

  • Note: This should be the default version for Ubuntu 18

• ROS Melodic Desktop Full

Steps

1. Create a catkin_ws directory

This will create a workspace to house all the code, including the simulations, on your computer. Open your terminal and copy these commands:

mkdir ~/catkin_ws/src 

cd ~/catkin_ws && catkin_make 

echo ~/catkin_ws/devel/setup.bash >> ~/.bashrc 

source ~/.bashrc 

2. Install dependencies

Before we can copy the code base, we need to make sure that we have some dependencies. Copy and paste these commands into your terminal.

Make sure you have ROS Melodic installed!

sudo apt install git-all  

sudo apt install python-tk 

curl -s https://packagecloud.io/install/repositories/dirk-thomas/vcstool/script.deb.sh | sudo bash 
sudo apt-get update 
sudo apt-get install python3-vcstool 

3. Ensure we have ROS dependencies

To run the codebase, we need to ensure that we have the proper ROS messages. To install them, copy and paste this into your terminal:

sudo apt install -y ros-melodic-ackermann-msgs ros-melodic-map-server ros-melodic-serial ros-melodic-urg-node ros-melodic-robot-state-publisher ros-melodic-xacro 

4. Install Necessary repositories

From our github repo, download repos.yaml into ~/catkin_ws/src

Then run:

vcs import < repos.yaml 

5. Install rangelibc:

Rangelibc is a python library used for different implementations of raycasting for 2D occupancy grids.

Install by running the following commands:

cd ~/catkin_ws/src/range_libc/pywrapper 

sudo python setup.py install 

cd ~/catkin_ws/src && rm -rf range_libc 

6. Run catkin_make to build everything

   cd ~/catkin_ws && catkin_make

Then you’ll want to source the workspace environment, so it's added to your path

echo 'source /opt/ros/melodic/setup.bash' >> ~/.bashrc 
echo 'source ~/catkin_ws/devel/setup.bash' >> ~/.bashrc 
source ~/.bashrc 

7. Change the default rviz configuration

cp ~/catkin_ws/src/mushr/mushr_utils/rviz/default.rviz ~/.rviz/

7. Running the simulation

In one terminal, launch teleoperation:

roslaunch mushr_sim teleop.launch 

In another terminal, launch rviz:

rviz 

You should now see the simulation for the ARC system.