Growbot Simulations

• The urdfs are based on this ROS tutorial
• The publisher portion is based on this ROS tutorial
• The heightmap for the gazebo world was created from following this Open Robotics video
• Quick ArUco tags came from chev.me/arucogen
• ArUco maker models for Gazebo came from github.com/joselusl/aruco_gazebo

Install growbot_simulations on Ubuntu 20.04

Prerequisites

• You need to have Ubuntu 20.04 and ROS Noetic installed, if you need help with installing ROS you can follow the guide here.

Clone the repository

mkdir -p ~/catkin_ws/src
cd ~/catkin_ws/src
git clone git@github.com:OSHE-Github/growbot_simulations

If you do not intend to contribute code you can clone with HTTPS instead git clone https://github.com/OSHE-Github/growbot_simulations.git

Update ROS Dependencies

cd ~/catkin_ws
rosdep update
rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src -r -y --rosdistro noetic

Install the controllers package needed for simulation

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ros-noetic-ros-controllers

Get the aruco_ros dependency

cd ~/catkin_ws/src
git clone https://github.com/pal-robotics/aruco_ros.git

Compile growbot_simulations source code

First build the project and source the setup file so that the system knows where to look for your build files (i.e. If you do not run the source command in your terminal none of the roslaunch commands will work)

cd ~/catkin_ws
catkin_make
source devel/setup.bash

One last install step, copy this repo's models to ~/.gazebo/models

This folder does not exist until gazebo has been launched at least one time. So fisrt install make sure to run and close gazebo.

gazebo

Now this next snippet will have to be run every time you update a model in ~/catkin_ws/src/growbot_simulations/models/

cp -r ~/catkin_ws/src/growbot_simulations/models ~/.gazebo/models

Running the simulations

Again, every new terminal opened needs to first source the setup.bash file before any of the following commands will work.

cd ~/catkin_ws
source devel/setup.bash

If you do not want to have to type this every time you open a new termainal window, you can add source ~/catkin_ws/devel/setup.bash to your ~/.bashrc:

echo "source ~/catkin_ws/devel/setup.bash" >> ~/.bashrc

Launch the main Gazebo simulation for the Growbot

roslaunch growbot_simulations gazebo.launch

Launch rviz to only see robot model and sensor data

roslaunch growbot_simulations rviz.launch

View the ROS nodes and topics as a graph

rqt_graph

Drive the robot around

roslaunch growbot_simulations nc_teleop.launch This command is broken, so use this instead:

python3 ~/catkin_ws/src/growbot_simulations/nc_teleop.py

Launch the ArUco marker detection node

roslaunch growbot_simulations aruco_marker_finder_gazebo.launch

View the ArUco detectors results

rosrun image_view image_view image:=/aruco_single/result

View just the robot's webcam

rosrun image_view image_view image:=/growbot/camera1/image_raw