In this episode I would like to talk about the need that robotics developers have of having a standard for robotics (in terms of API).
By having a robotics standard, developers can concentrate on building solutions that do not have to be re-implemented whenever the robot hardware changes. Actually, given the middleware structure, developers can disassociate so much from the hardware that they can almost rely 100% of its time in the software realm while developing for robotics
Selected quote from the podcast:
In my opinion, ROS is not yet the standard in robotics, but it is becoming the standard. At The Construct we really believe that is going to become the standard.
Ricardo Tellez
[irp posts=”6751″ name=”Post:The Need For Robotics Standards”]
This is a quick guide on how to get your Raspberry Pi up and running to start your first steps into robotics with ROS (Kinetic).
This guide is a compilation of methods described by other people so please do check out the links if you need more detailed explanations.
In this guide you are going to learn how to:
Prepare a MicroSD card with Ubuntu Mate Operation System for Raspberry Pi 2 or 3.
Get the LCD screen up and running
Install Full ROS Kinetic
Setup your Raspberry Pi camera
Publish Image Stream into ROS Topics
What to do after this
Apendix-1: Bill of Materials
Apendix-2: Reference Links
You can find all the Bill of materials at the bottom of the post just in case you want the exact same setup.
So let’s get to it, shall we?
Install Ubuntu Mate Operation System in Raspberry Pi
From now on, this post supposes that you have all the material used in this example. If not please refer to the Bill of Materials. So normally you will have already an OS installed in your starter kit MicroSD card with NOOBS. But we want to have the full Ubuntu experience, which will make installing ROS Kinetic much easier.
For this part, we will use an Ubuntu machine, but the process will be slightly different for Windows or Mac-OS.
Now just plug your Raspberry Pi to your outlet and to a monitor through HDMI and … There you have it!
Get the LCD screen up and running
Now that you have your Raspberry Pi with Ubuntu-Mate just type in a terminal in your Raspberry Pi ( just connect the HDMI cable to your closest monitor):
Ok, you have now Ubuntu with a cute LCD screen. Now to install Full ROS Kinetic, with gazebo simulator, RVIZ and everything you need for robotics projects. Go to a terminal in your Raspberry Pi and type:
Now open the file /boot/config.txt and add the following two lines at the bottom of the file:
start_x=1
gpu_mem=128
And then just reboot the Raspberry Pi:
sudo reboot
Then to test that everything went ok and works, just execute this tiny python script. If you get the image, then the camera is working perfectly:
import picamera
camera = picamera.PiCamera()
camera.capture('mytest_image.jpg')
camera.close()
Publish Image Stream into ROS Topics
But we need to publish our camera images into ROS, so that we can then use the thousands of ROS packages to do all the nice robotics stuff that we love!
For that we are going to use a ROS package created for this purpose: Publish Raspberry Pi Camera images into an image rostopic. Go to a terminal in your Raspberry Pi and type:
cd ~/catkin_ws/src
git clone https://github.com/dganbold/raspicam_node.git
cd ~/catkin_ws/
catkin_make --pkg raspicam_node
If the compilation went Ok, you now can use it. For this, you have to first start the node with all the services for the camera.
cd ~/catkin_ws/
source devel/setup.bash
roslaunch raspicam_node camera_module_v2_640x480_30fps.launch
Then on another terminal, start the Camera service, which will activate the camera and start publishing. You can see that it worked because when started a red LED will light up on the camera.
rosservice call /raspicam_node/start_capture
camera_on
And now you are ready to view the images and use them in ROS. You can use rqt_image_view, for example, to connect to the image published in a topic and see it. here are two options to see the video stream:
Well, you should learn how to use ROS Kinetic and harness all its power! Try this ROS in 5 days Course.
Object Recognition, Perception, Person Detection/Recognition, create a simulation of your future robot that will be controlled by your ROS Raspberry Pi…
The best place to do it FAST and EASY is in RobotIgniteAcademy. There you will learn this and much more.
ROS Development Studio (ROSDS)
Want to practice freely, try ROSDevelopment Studio, here you will be able to test all your programs first in simulation and when they are ready, deploy them into your ROS Raspberry Pi without any conversion.
[irp posts=”12183″ name=” How to build the Structure of a ROS Raspberry Pi Robot #Ep.1″]
Apendix-1: BOM
Here you have a list of all the materials used for this tutorial of ROS Raspberry Pi:
In this session of The ROS Developers Podcast, I chat with Cecilio Angulo, associate professor at Technical University of Catalonia and director of the Intelligent Data Science and Artificial Intelligence Research Center. We will talk about a project he started to bring Aibo robot back to life again by using ROS.
He talks about how the whole thing started and why. Then he describes the different parts implemented in the Aibo ROSification and how the Aibo simulation in Gazebo is important for the development. He also describes the application that makes several Aibo imitate to each other by connecting all of them through a ROS node, as well as the modules for accessing different sensors of Aibo. Finally, we talk about how to make a ROSified Aibo reproduce the famous MTN (motion) files that Sone generated containing predefined movements.
Selected quote to from the interview
By ROSifying the Aibo robot, you can apply reinforcement learning, dynamic motion primitives, deal with all the images using deep learning… all the ROS world is there to be used with the robot.
In this episode, I interview Enrico Mingo Hoffman, postdoc researcher at the Humanoids & Human Centered Mechatronics Lab of the Italian Institute of Technology. He will talk about their open implementation of the Stack of Tasks for the whole body control of humanoid (and non-humanoid) robots. He will also explain how their development environment at the lab works, and will discuss some differences between ROS and YARP, another framework for robot programming developed at Italy. He will end suggesting about the creation of an OSRF – Europe. Do not miss that!
Selected quote to from the interview
What I expect at the beginning is that the robot stands… without exploding!
