Embedded Motion Control 2013

Guide towards the assignment
'A-MAZE-ING JAZZ'

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Introduction

This course is about software design and how to apply this in the context of autonomous robots. The accompanying assignment is about applying this knowledge to a real-life robotics task in which ROS will be the standard software framework.

Course Schedule

Lectures will be given on Mondays from 10.45 - 12.30 in Gemini-Zuid 3A12. The course schedule is as follows:

September, 4th	Introduction	Assignment and basic computer setup
September, 11th	Localization	C++ and ROS Concepts
September, 18th	Navigation	Software design
September 25th	Corridor competition
October, 2nd	Separation of Concerns: the 5 C's
October 9th	State estimation	Whole-body motion planning and control
October 16th	Intelligent agents
October 23th	Final competition

Pico test schedule, maze

In order to test your software on the Pico robot, each group has one one hour time slot a week available, on either Wednesday or Thursday. You can reserve your test slot in the table below. Make sure to keep at least one hour in between you slot and the previous and next ones, since Pico needs some time to recharge in between the time slots!

Date	Time	Group
Wednesday June, 13th	09:00 - 10:00	Group 9

Slides

The slides of the various lectures will be available a.s.a.p.

Goal

The goal of the assignment is to get the real-time concepts in embedded software design operational.

The concrete task that has to be solved is to let the PICO robot find his way out of a maze. The final demonstration by each participating group of 4-5 students will be performed during a contest, the winner of which is the group that exits the maze in the shortest amount of time. To prepare for this competition the following guidelines have to be considered:

• to test with PICO and to prepare for the final contest, a simulator will be made available that mimics the in and outputs to the real robot. Specifics of this simulator will be presented in the first lecture on September 4th
• the maze of the final competition will be constructed just before the competition. The maze presented in the simulator is therefore different from the real one used in the final contest.
• both on the real and simulated PICO robot, three sources of sensor information will be available to perceive the environment and to derive the state of the robot:
  • laserdata provided by the forward pointing laser scanner,
  • images captured by the monocular camera,
  • odometry provided by the base controller
• the robot can be actuated by sending information to the base controller
• during the final contest, it is highly imperative that the PICO robot refrains from colliding with the walls in the maze. Colliding with the walls will result in severe time-penalties.
• the walls of the maze will contain several types of pointers to the exit, which can potentially help PICO to speed up execution of the task Click here for a pdf file containing the arrow we will use. We also captured PICO's camera topics in a bag file while the robot was looking at the arrow. You can play this bag file as follows:

  rosbag play 2013-10-08-15-35-04.bag

  The topics /pico/camera and /pico/camera_info should then become available. For example, while playing the bag file, use

  rosrun image_view image_view image:=/pico/camera

  to view the camera images.

Corridor Competition

An intermediate review will be held on May 16th, during the corridor competition. During this challenge the students have to let the robot drive through a corridor and then take the first exit. The precise location of this exit will not be given in advance. Some facts:

The exit can be either left or right It is not known beforehand how far the exit is located from the start (somewhere between 1 and 10 meters) It is not known beforehand if the opposing end wall (on the far end) will be open or closed The walls are approximately parallel to each other Note: the walls might not be perfectly straight The distance between the walls is not known in advance, but will be reasonable (somewhere between 0.5 and 1.5 meters). The distance between the walls will be fairly constant throughout the corridor, 'fairly' meaning that we build the corridor by hand, and the distance may change a little along the corridor. PICO will start with its laser range finder between the walls PICO will be approximately facing the end of the corridor. (Notice: approximately, so don't just drive forward for n seconds!) At the exit, the finish line is located approximately 30 cm from the side of the corridor (Notice: approximately, so don't just drive forward for 30 cm!). The walls that can be used to align PICO will be a little bit longer. You have finished the assignment if PICO did not drive into walls, took the correct turn, the castor wheels are across the finish line. Hitting the wall will result in 0 points!

During the final contest, the groups are expected to give a short (5 minute) presentation about their progress and design decisions. During the corridor competition no presentation is expected.

Hardware

The moving Jazz robot with monocular camera and laser range finder with a working ROS interface. In addition, we provide a Jazz simulator for offline testing.

Installation

This manual describes how to the install the necessary and sufficient software to start programming the Jazz robot.

Simulator

Installation

If you followed all steps specified on the installation page , you will already have downloaded the simulator Gazebo and our specific Jazz simulator. To be able to use the Jazz simulator, you first have to compile the downloaded ROS packages:

1. Open a terminal (ctrl-alt-t)
2. Make sure rosdep is initialized and up to date:

   sudo rosdep init

   rosdep update

3. Build and compile the jazz simulator and other necessary packages:

   rosmake jazz_gazebo gazebo_map_spawner

Furthermore, Gazebo needs to know where to find the robot description (located in jazz_description) which includes its meshes, textures, kinematic chain, etc, and where to find the plugins for the controllers and sensors. This information can be set in the environment variables GAZEBO_PLUGIN_PATH and GAZEBO_MODEL_PATH:

1. Open a terminal (ctrl-alt-t)
2. Open .bashrc:

   gedit ~/.bashrc

3. Add the following lines:

   export GAZEBO_PLUGIN_PATH=~/ros/emc/general/jazz_gazebo/lib:~/ros/emc/general/tue_gazebo_plugins/lib:$GAZEBO_PLUGIN_PATH

   export GAZEBO_MODEL_PATH=~/ros/emc/general/jazz_description:$GAZEBO_MODEL_PATH

4. and source your .bashrc:

   source ~/.bashrc

   or start a new terminal.

Starting the Simulator

1. Start Gazebo:

   gazebo

2. Start another terminal and spawn the maze:

   rosrun gazebo_map_spawner spawn_maze

3. Spawn PICO:

   roslaunch pico_gazebo pico.launch

Notice that the Jazz robot is spawned in the Gazebo world. The Gazebo GUI shows how the world actually is. We can also visualize how the robot perceives it through its sensors, by using the ROS tool Rviz. You can start RViz with a pre-defined config showing most of Jazz' sensors using:

rosrun jazz_visualization rviz

In fact, this simply runs the following command:

rosrun rviz rviz -d ~/ros/general/jazz_visualization/rviz/jazz.vcg

If you are running the Gazebo simulation, you will see the Jazz robot model and white dots which represent the sensor data originating from the (simulated) laser range finder. RViz allows you to visualize many more things. For example, to show the data from the camera:

1. Click on the Add button in the lower left
2. Select Camera and click OK. A Camera item will pop up in the Displays view on the left.
3. Click in the field right next to Image Topic and click the ... button. Now you can select the camera topic (/pico/camera/image)

You will see the camera images visualized in the lower left of your screen.

Examples

Here are some examples on how to use the simulator and how to practice the corridor competition in simulation.

Jazz Driving Example

1. Have a look at the file jazz_node.cpp in the src folder of the jazz_example package. You should be able to understand what the program will do.
2. Build the package:

   rosmake jazz_example

3. Run the node (make sure the simulator is still running):

   rosrun jazz_example jazz_node

   Check the result in both Gazebo and RViz.
4. Feel free to use this example as a start for your project

Jazz Safe Driving Example

1. First of all, make sure you have the latest version of the jazz_example package:

   1. roscd jazz_example

   2. svn up

2. Take some time to have a good look at the file safe_drive.cpp in the src folder of the jazz_example package. It contains a quite elaborate explanation of what is going on in the code, which will hopefully clarify quite some things.
3. Build the package:

   rosmake jazz_example

4. Run the node (make sure the simulator is still running):

   rosrun jazz_example safe_drive

   Check the result in both Gazebo and RViz.
5. Feel free to use this example as a start for your project

Troubleshoot

Gazebo does not stop gracefully upon exit or interrupt (ctrl-c)

You may get the warning:

Warning [gazebo_main.cc:59] escalating to SIGKILL on server

when stopping Gazebo. This is a known bug and has no consequences, other than that it takes a bit longer to kill Gazebo.

Getting Started

To get started, please do the following tutorials:

• C++ tutorial
• ROS tutorial Note that you have already installed and configured your ROS environment, so you can skip the first tutorial. It is advised to work in your group folder, i.e., ~/ros/group_?.
• Getting started with the Jazz simulator
• Using Jazz

FAQ

Here you can find a collection of Frequently Asked Questions. Please check this page before contacting the tutors! If you find any issues or questions you had to deal with, please add them as well so your colleagues don't run into the same problems.