MRC/Using Pico

Starting Pico

To start Pico or Taco please follow the following steps:

1. Power on the robot
   • For Pico, the on-off switch is on the bottom, next to the emergency button. This also starts the on-board computer
   • For Taco, the on-off switch is on the outer edge of the base. Also start the laptop, if it is not already on (you don't need to log in).
2. From here on, you should work on the operator laptop. Open a terminal and type

   ssh<robot name>

   where <robot name> is either pico or taco, depending on which robot you want to use. Using this command, you login on the robot's computer; the password is again emc. You are now working directly on the robot's computer through the WiFi.
3. Now that you are in, you can start all the necessary nodes on the robot. These controllers and drivers let your software communicate with the hardware. On the robot (so in the terminal you opened in the previous step) enter
   • For Pico:

     pstart

   • For Taco:

     tstart

4. N.B. leave this terminal open!

Running your software

Pico/Taco is now up and running. To run your own software follow these steps:

1. Open a new terminal and login to your robot again:

   ssh<robot name>

   with password emc.
2. Go to your group's folder:

   cd ~/groups/emc<group number>

3. The rest works the same as on your own PC.
   • The first time, you will have to clone your git project on the robot's computer:

     git clone http://roboticssrv.wtb.tue.nl:8800/emc<group number>/my_project.git shared_project

     Of course with your own group number, project name etc. Just like you did on the PCs of the group members.
   • Any next time you can just navigate to your group's folder and

     git pull

   • Now that your own software is up to date, you can compile it and run it, again just like you would on your own laptop.

Visualization

When you want to visualize the robot while testing, you can do the following

1. Open a new terminal
2. Type

   <robot name>-core

   This makes sure that any software you run in this terminal listens to the ros-master on your robot.
3. So if you now run our visualization software by entering

   emc-viz

   it will subscribe to the topics published on the robot.

Recording data

A simulator simulates a perfect world, so if your software works in the simulator, it is not (at all) guaranteed to work in the real world. But because you only have limited testing time on the robots, it would be nice if you could somehow simulate being in the real world. Luckily, the developers of ROS also ran into this, so they create rosbag. Using rosbag you can record data published by the robot and play it later when you want to test an awesome new feature of your software using real sensor data, or if you just want to inspect the quality of the sensor data, etc.

1. The first step is again to open a terminal
2. Almost done...