Takin

Capra-Takin is a ROS-based solution for managing and operating Club Capra's rescue robot.

Technologies used

• Ubuntu 18.04LTS
• ROS melodic
• git + GitHub

Getting Started

This section will help you get ready to work on the Takin project. It is supposed to give you the necessary information to understand ROS and how our project is built. There's also documentation on how to launch and use our project.

ROS Documentation \ Tutorial

The ROS documentation can be found at : http://wiki.ros.org/

It is a requirement to understand the basics of ROS and Linux to be proficient in the project.

As an initiation task, we ask that you complete the series of tutorials offered by ROS : http://wiki.ros.org/ROS/Tutorials. It is generally advised to stop at the roswtf tutorial.

Building our project

To build the project the first time, you need to execute the install.sh which will configure, compile and regenerate the necessary bindings to use ROS with our nodes. After that, you'll be able to use catkin_make and source your build manually.

Here are the steps to build our project :

mkdir -p catkin_ws/src
cd catkin_ws/src
git clone https://github.com/clubcapra/Takin takin
cd ..
./src/takin/install.sh

You need to select the right setup file for your shell when sourcing.

source devel/setup.bash

Installing dependencies

To install dependencies, go to the top directory of your catkin workspace where the source code of the ROS packages you'd like to use are. Then run:

rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src -r -y

Executing a node

There are two options to launch a node.

• rosrun
• roslaunch

If you just want to launch the robot for a demo, log into the robot using ssh then:

source ~/Code/takin_ws/devel/setup.bash
roslaunch takin_bringup takin_base.launch &

Debugging

To debug a node the following options exits:

• Checking the basics

  Issue	Command
  Checking if the master is reacheable	roswtf
  Checking if node exists	rosnode list
  Checking if topic exist	rostopic list
  Checking if message is published	rostopic echo /your_topic_here
  Checking the frequency of a message publication	rostopic hz /your_topic_here

• If a permission error happens:

  Issue	Command
  Check if the device is available on your computer. (Ex: takin_estop won't run on anything else than a Jetson TX2)	lsusb or ls /sys/class/gpio or specific to your hardware
  Check if you have the proper udev copied in your folder.	ls /etc/udev/rules.d/

Contibution

If you want to contribute to the project, you can fork it and then PR to add or modify code.

Standard

At this moment, we don't have a coding standard, but it is something we want to implement in the future. For new code, we recommend using the ROS CppStyleGuide.