robotdev

My repository for robot-related development.

Watch this Youtube tutorial on Spot development which includes an introduction and demo of this framework starting at 55:17.

Structure

Each robot gets a corresponding directory. The directory is typically (at least contains) a designated ROS workspace for that robot. The robot-specific code is maintained in submodules (i.e. other repositories). This repository serves as the hub for all the robot-related development efforts.

To setup your Linux machine (Ubuntu 20.04) for a robot:

git submodule update --init --recursive  # optional
source setup_{robot_name}.bash

Docker

By default, we assume you use ROS Noetic on Ubuntu 20.04. If you are using a different version of ROS, please use the Docker container for that ROS version.

Note: If your computer has NVidia GPU and you would like NVidia GPU support inside the docker container, please read this wiki instead of step 1 and 2.

Otherwise, as an example, to start the container for robotdev using ROS Kinetic:

1. Build the docker image. Replace 'kaiyu' to the username of yourself on your host machine

   source docker/build.kinetic.sh --hostuser=kaiyu
   

   If you run docker images, you should see:

   REPOSITORY   TAG       IMAGE ID       CREATED         SIZE
   robotdev     kinetic   3293f13a9b25   7 seconds ago   1.13GB
   

   When using the docker/build.noetic.sh, you can provide a custom string as the suffix of the image tag name:

   source docker/build.kinetic.sh --tag-suffix=joy
   

   Then the tab of the image will become noetic:joy. (TODO for kinetic)

2. Run the docker container

   source docker/run.kinetic.sh
   

   To run it so that GUI (X11 forwarding) is supported:

   source docker/run.kinetic.sh --gui
   

   Note that if you exit from a container, you can restart it as follows. First list the containers that are stopped:

   docker ps --filter "status=exited"
   CONTAINER ID   IMAGE              COMMAND                  CREATED         STATUS                            PORTS     NAMES
   b4c0f9d589f0   robotdev:kinetic   "/ros_entrypoint.sh …"   4 minutes ago   Exited (130) About a minute ago             vigilant_keller
   

   Then, run docker restart. Note that it supports autocompletion by container names.

   docker restart vigilant_keller
   

   Then, run the following

   docker attach vigilant_keller
   

   You will regain the shell (may need to press enter once).

3. To have access to convenient docker functions such as dsh, dls, etc. run

   source docker_functions.sh
   

   Note that you should do this outside docker (of course you don't want to run docker inside docker!)