Embedded Motion Control/Tutorials/Setting up the PICO simulator 2015

Introduction

During the course, we have 10 large groups and only one robot, so test time on the robot is scarce. Fortunately, we have a virtual (software) representation of the robot that can be used to simulate the robot. At the moment it:

• Simulates the movement of the robot
• The laser data of the robot, created by the virtual environment
• Provide a simple visualization

This should already be enough to get you started, and more will be added later (odometry, better dynamics, etc).

Updating the simulator

Before you start working with the simulator, make sure you have our latest version by running

emc-update

This will download the latest changes and compile the updated software (framework and simulator). I will notify you when I made changes to the software such that you can run the updater, but feel free to run the command whenever you want.

Starting the simulator

As was already stated before, we will not be using ROS in this course, unless you really want to use it yourself. However, secretly the provided tools are build on top of that; the inter-process communication to be more specific. Don't worry about it too much. The only thing you need to know is that before running the simulator or your software, you need to create a roscore. Simply open a terminal an run:

roscore

and keep it running. This allows processes to 'find' each other and communicate. For example, the software abstraction layer we provide 'talks' to the simulator through this roscore.

Enough about ROS, let's start the simulator! Open a terminal and run

emc-sim

That's it! What you will see, is a visualization of the virtual environment (the white lines are walls) and a top-down view of the robot (the red lines).

Controlling the robot

Now, as you can see, not much is happening. The robot is standing still in a static environment. Let's change that! A first simple way to test the simulator is by controlling the robot using your keyboard. Just run:

pico-teleop

and you will be able to control the robot using the numpad keys. You can rotate the robot using '/' and '*'.