Barney

Repository for all code related to the BARN Barney greeting robot.

The project will use Ubuntu 22.04 and ROS2 Humble as a starting point.

Table of Contents:

• Overview
• Demo
• Project Structure
• Installation
• Usage
• Contributions
• Acknowledgments

Overview

We are going to start the Barney project by simulating a greeting robot in PyRoboSim.

PyRoboSim is a lightweight 2D mobile robot simulator for behaviour prototyping. We use PyRoboSim to create a custom world of each of the BARN building floors using a BARN floor plan. It includes defining the office rooms and studios, hallways, some locations and objects from pick-and-place tasks. We use the PyRoboSim demo robot. To control the robots, we can use the GUI, python scripts or ROS actions/services.

The first step is to give a tour of the BARN Tech Lab.

Demo

Project Structure

Barney/                 # Barney project Root
├── src/                # Source code
├── INSTALL_MAC.md      # Install instructions for MAC
├── INSTALL_Ubuntu.md   # Install instructions for Linux/Ubuntu
├── INSTALL_WINDOWS.md  # Install instructions for Windows
├── LICENSE.md          # License
├── README.md           # README

Installation

The native installation for this project is on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) with ROS2 Humble. You can find information about these platforms at:

• https://releases.ubuntu.com/jammy/
• https://docs.ros.org/en/humble/Installation.html

There are installation instructions for Ubuntu, MAC and Windows. For MAC and Ubuntu, we will use a Docker virtual environment. Windows will use WSL (Windows Subsytem for Linux).

Usage

If you have properly setup your environment using one of the INSTALL files above, you should be able to use the following command to start a local copy of PyRoboSim.

cd /Barney/src/pyrobosim # Use ~/Barney/src/pyrobosim for Windows
python3 examples/barn_tech_lab.py

To run under ROS (which is the preferred way to run - and the way we will run on the physical robot), you must execute these commands once a session (not needed if running a Docker container).

cd /Barney/            # Use ~/Barney/ for Windows
. install/setup.bash

To run the pyrobosim graphical interface, run the following command:

ros2 run pyrobosim_ros barn_tech_lab.py

To run the Tech Lab tour, use the following command (using a ROS2 launch file).

ros2 launch pyrobosim_ros barn_commands.launch.py mode:=plan

Contributions

To contribute to this repository, you must first clone this repository

git clone https://github.com/BainbridgeArtisanResourceNetwork/Barney.git

We recommend that you create a new branch for your work, and merge your changes into main when you are confident that the changes are tested and working.

Another way to work from this repository is to fork it, and then clone your fork. That will allow you to work independently within your repository, and if you want to contribute back to this original repository, you can open a Pull Request of your changes back to here. There is further documentation on this process here: Collaborating with Pull Requests and Forks

We strongly recommend that you use the Docker images on both Ubuntu and MAC. This will require you to learn and install Docker. See https://docs.docker.com/get-started/. We also provide a 'local setup' for both when developing on Windows and running on Robot hardware (Raspberry Pi).

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Sebastian Castro, the owner and maintainer of the PyRoboSim simulator for creaing this useful open-source tool. All rights and license for PyRoboSim used in this project belongs to Sebastian Castro.