RoCKIn2014PhaseI

Hardware Preparation

We need to make some initial tasks to fulfill the basic hardware setup, configuration, and customization of the robot.

Task 1

Get power from roomba brush (It is going to be used in the arm )

The roomba vacuum has an especial hardware to connect and disconnect the supply from the brush motors and vacuum motor. This hardware is an electronic switch that works connecting and disconnecting the ground of the motor to control.

In order to powered the arm, we connect two wires to the place where is connected the vacuum motor and disconnected it.

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Task 2

Emergency Stop Button

In order to stop the robot in a emergency way, we connect a emergency switch trough two wires, between the positive pole of the battery (picture 4) and the connector of it (picture 8), to the roomba vacuum.

Task 3

Start Button

The start button must be start a program, for this way a push button is connected to a microcontroller, in this case is connected to a digital input of an Arduino. This digital input is powered to 5V (HIGH state) trough a pull-up resistor. When the start button is pushed, it connect the digital input to ground and set the input to LOW state for a little time, the microcontroller reads the LOW and send a signal to the computer, in order to run the program.

Software Preparation

Environment setup

We are going to define the basis of the system to be deployed.

• Operative System : Ubuntu 12.04 LTS
• Software Restriction : ROS Fuerte
• Core drivers for Roomba : How to install roomba package

Packages search

We use ROS so we can find at least a package for each ability ready to deploy in a robot. In this way, this task involves search and test each package to evaluate if we are able to deploy in our platform.

 Navigation 
   2D navigation stack
   Turtlebot Navigation

 Mapping
   SLAM

 Object recognition
    Simple Qt interface to try OpenCV implementations of SIFT, SURF, FAST, BRIEF and other feature detectors and descriptors.
    find-object stack

 Speech recognition
   Speech Recognition and Text-to-Speech (TTS) in π robot
   Packages pocketsphinx and Festival

 Cognition 
    Ongoing task

Person recognition

Person tracking

Object manipulation

Gesture recognition

Ros: Debugging Techniques

It is possible to make debugging in ROS in two ways

Launch file

Following the Roslaunch techniques

 
launch-prefix="xterm -e gdb --args" : run your node in a gdb in a separate xterm window, manually type run to start it

launch-prefix="gdb -ex run --args" : run your node in gdb in the same xterm as your launch without having to type run to start it

launch-prefix="valgrind" : run your node in valgrind

launch-prefix="xterm -e" : run your node in a separate xterm window

launch-prefix="nice" : nice your process to lower its CPU usage

launch-prefix="screen -d -m gdb --args" : useful if the node is being run on another machine; you can then ssh to that machine and do screen -D -R to see the gdb session

launch-prefix="xterm -e python -m pdb" : run your python node a separate xterm window in pdb for debugging; manually type run to start it 

then you only have to do

roslaunch <package> <launch>

Running a single node

Following the Commandline techniques

rosrun <package> <node>

instead use

roscd <package>

valgrind bin/<node>

or

gdb bin/<node>

or

gdb 
      GNU gdb (Ubuntu/Linaro 7.4-2012.04-0ubuntu2.1) 7.4-2012.04
      Copyright (C) 2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
      License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>
      This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
      There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.  Type "show copying"
       and "show warranty" for details.
       This GDB was configured as "x86_64-linux-gnu".
      Para las instrucciones de informe de errores, vea:
      <http://bugs.launchpad.net/gdb-linaro/>.

      (gdb) file <route to node>
      (gdb) run 
 

Don't forget to add Debug in the CMakeLists.txt

 
cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 2.4.6)
include($ENV{ROS_ROOT}/core/rosbuild/rosbuild.cmake)
set(ROS_BUILD_TYPE Debug)

#set(ROS_BUILD_TYPE Release)
rosbuild_init(node)

set(EXECUTABLE_OUTPUT_PATH ${PROJECT_SOURCE_DIR}/bin)

rosbuild_gensrv()
rosbuild_add_boost_directories()

add_subdirectory(src)

EXTRA - Core dumps

The easy way to get core dumps

Set the core size to unlimited (if it is not set) :

$ ulimit -a
core file size          (blocks, -c) 0
...< more info here >...

$ ulimit -c unlimited

$ ulimit -a
core file size          (blocks, -c) unlimited
...< more info here >...

To allow core dumps to be created (Ubuntu way)

$ sudo -s
# echo 1 > /proc/sys/kernel/core_uses_pid