ROS Driver of The Single Beam Sonar from BlueRobotics

We need access permission of the ttyUSB port to communicate with the sensor. To check whether we have the access, run the following command

groups | grep tty

If we can see tty in red, we can proceed to the next step. Otherwise, add the current user to the tty group.

sudo usermod -a -G tty $USER

Log out and log back in to verify whether we are in the tty group now.

bluerobotics-ping requires Python3. We create the ROS Noetic virtual environment in Conda so that this package can be used on Ubuntu 16.04/18.04 as well.

1. Install Miniconda: https://docs.conda.io/en/latest/miniconda.html
2. Follow https://github.com/RoboStack/ros-noetic to create a ROS Noetic virtual environment called ros
3. Create a catkin workspace if necessary

mkdir -p ~/sonar_ws/src

2. Clone this repo

cd ~/sonar_ws/src
git clone https://github.com/Weizhe-Chen/single_beam_sonar.git

3. Install ping-python to read the sonar data

conda activate ros
pip install bluerobotics-ping

4. Build the package

cd ~/sonar_ws/
catkin build
. devel/setup.bash

5. Launch the driver

roslaunch single_beam_sonar driver.launch

6. Check the published data

rqt_console

7. Alternatively, we can run the node directly rather than doing step 5 and 6

# In another terminal
roscore
# In the terminal with conda virtualenv and ~/sonar_ws/devel/setup.sh sourced
rosrun single_beam_sonar driver.py

8. Check rostopic

   rostopic info /sonar
   rostopic echo /sonar

   

9. (Optional) I've added the following lines in the ~/.bashrc file of the on-board computer to activate the Noetic virtual environment and catkin workspace whenever we open a terminal

   # vim ~/.bashrc
   conda activate ros
   source ~/sonar_ws/devel/setup.bash