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).

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).