Corobot ROS nodes.

Adopted from http://sourceforge.net/projects/roscorobot/ and modified to run on ROS Groovy.

These instructions work with the ROS Groovy virtual machine, available at www.ros.org. They will likely work on any Ubuntu install with ROS, and may work on other operating systems.

These instructions assume you have a catkin workspace called 'catkin_ws' in your home folder.

The Corobot ROS nodes are dependent on the following OS libraries:

• joystick
• libgps-dev
• libopenni-dev
• libqt4-dev
• libspnav-dev
• libusb-dev
• Phidgets Library

The Corobot ROS nodes are also dependent on the following ROS packages:

• joy (part of joystick_drivers, http://www.ros.org/wiki/joystick_drivers)
• openni_camera (http://www.ros.org/wiki/openni_camera)
• qt_build (part of qt_ros, http://www.ros.org/wiki/qt_ros)

Follow this guide to install the the Phidgets library: http://www.phidgets.com/docs/OS_-_Linux#Installing

Install the other required OS libraries with apt-get sudo apt-get install joystick libgps-dev libopenni-dev libqt4-dev libspnav-dev libusb-dev

Clone the ROS package code into 'catkin_ws/src':

cd ~/catkin_ws/src
git clone https://github.com/ros-drivers/joystick_drivers.git
git clone https://github.com/ros-drivers/openni_camera.git
git clone https://github.com/stonier/qt_ros.git

Add your workspace to the current bash session:

cd ~/catkin_ws
source devel/setup.bash

Clean and build your workspace:

cd ~/catkin_ws
rm -rf build
catkin_make

Note that you have to manually clear the build folder for changes to be picked up.

Clone this project into '~/catkin_ws/src' and build using rosmake:

cd ~/catkin_ws/src
git clone https://github.com/gtagency/roscorobot.git
cd roscorobot
rosmake Corobot

This will take several minutes to complete, after which you will be able to run the nodes.

To run the default configuration, use the launch file contained in the corobot_teleop package:

roslaunch corobot_teleop corobot_ros_gui.launch 

This assumes that the workspace was previously added to the current bash session. This will launch the GUI and nodes to manage the various sensors, and enable keyboard teleop.

To develop applications on the Corobot, you must work within a ROS workspace. This is because the Corobot code is built using "dry" packages (e.g. rosbuild packages). Luckily, the ROS workspace can be overlayed on top of the catkin workspace built above.

These instructions assume that you will use a ROS workspace called 'rosbuild_ws' in your home directory.

Create the workspace and overlay it on top of the existing catkin workspace:

mkdir ~/rosbuild_ws
cd ~/rosbuild_ws
rosws init . ~/catkin_ws/devel
source setup.bash

Create the sandbox folder that will contain your packages:

cd ~/rosbuild_ws
mkdir sandbox
rosws set sandbox
source setup.bash

Now we can create a package called example. This package will depend on rospy, std_msgs, and corobot_msgs (to publish to Corobot notes):

cd ~/rosbuild_ws
source setup.bash
cd sandbox
roscreate-pkg example std_msgs rospy corobot_msgs
rosmake example

This should complete successfully.

There is one last thing you need to do once you've created a python node. At the top of your python file, underneath the environment definition (e.g. "#!/usr/bin/env python"), add the following:

import roslib; roslib.load_manifest('example')

where example is the name of the package you created.

The following changes were made to support Groovy:

Replace

rosbuild_include(qt_build qt-ros)

with

find_package(catkin REQUIRED COMPONENTS qt_build roscpp)
include_directories(${catkin_INCLUDE_DIRS})

in corobot_teleop/CMakeLists.txt, to properly include qt_build with the Groovy build tools.

Replace the following Qt keywords

foreach
emit
signals
slots

with the corresponding macros

Q_FOREACH
Q_EMIT
Q_SIGNALS
Q_SLOTS

in corobot_teleop/src. This was required for corobot_teleop to compile against Qt4 and ROS Groovy.