MRC/Tutorials/Real robot

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Now you know how to write robot software, lets discuss how to work with the hardware. We are using two types of robots, Jackal and the rosbots Bobo and Coco. Their operation will be slightly different.

Hero

starting Hero

To start the robot long press the power button, after about three seconds you will hear the fans starting up. Once you can see the battery level on the screen of the robot (NOT a touchscreen!) the robot is properly started. You can now start the hardware by releasing the emergency stop button. The robot will assume its default pose. To stop the robot simply press the emergency stop button. This will stop the hardware (but not your software!). When the emergency button is pressed you can push the robot around. Pushing the robot requires some force but please do be careful. Releasing the emergency stop will cause the hardware to start up again. Do not attempt to move the robot by hand when the emergency button is released.

Bobo and Coco

starting Bobo and Coco

When you turn on the power switch on the rosbots the computer will start up but the hardware will not start running yet. To start the hardware open a terminal, type sshbobo or sshcoco depending on your robot. You will notice the green text changing to husarion@bobo or husarion@coco. This indicates that you are now operating a terminal on the computer inside the robot. In order to ssh into the rosbots you might have to provide the password of the rosbot. The password is provided by the student assistents.

Then type bobo-start or coco-start. You should notice the lidar start spinning. The hardware is now starting up. The rosbots do not have an emergency stop. But they are light enough to not be a danger. You can pick them up if you need to stop them quickly. To stop the hardware you can press ctrl+C in the terminal running bobo/coco-start.

Charging Bobo and Coco

To charge the rosbots connect the chargers. Press the green button to set the charging amperage and voltage. Set these to 1.5A and 11.1V. Then long press the green button, the charger will perform a battery check and ask for confirmation one more time. Confirm by pressing the green button. To stop charging press the red button before removing the charger from the robot.

robot core

Normally all your tools, like Rviz, teleop, etc will try to communicate with your laptop. We should specify that we want to listen to the signals passed on the robot. This is already done on the robot laptops, so you don't need to do anything. If, for whatever reason, this is not the case, you can do it manually using

<robot>-core

From that point on any command you do afterward will try to communicate with that robot.

rviz

To visualize the LRF measurements open a terminal on your laptop and input hero-rviz, bobo-rviz, or coco-rviz, depending on your robot.

Teleop

Instead of pushing the robot by hand you can control the robot remotely using your keyboard. On the robot-laptop open a terminal and input.

mrc-teleop

and you will be able to move the robot forward and backward with 'w' and 's', you can rotate the robot using 'a' and 'd' and you can stop movement with any other key.

Running your software

We control the robots from the laptops. You will find a folder called mrc on the laptops where you can use git pull to get your code. Remember to build your code as only source files will be on git.