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Welcome to the youbot-thesis wiki!

This project was related to my Automation engineering B.Sc dissertation. For more information about I advise you to read my thesis. Here just how to set-up the environment.

Set-up

To provide code relocation and re-usability, in this passage is presented how to properly set-up the system so everyone that would like to improve it and/or add new features is facilitated on the installation procedure. This part of the thesis is designed also for people that do not have experiences with robotics. I suggest an intensive and careful read of the documents and links.

As pointed above the Linux distribution used is Ubuntu 14.04.5 LTS in couple with ROS Indigo. Toward the system set up I suggest downloading packages from the GitHub repository of the thesis project, only after having created the environment as explained in the following paragraph.

First step, after the download and installation of Ubuntu and ROS Indigo, is to follow the instructions in tutorial_vrep_youbot_ros.pdf file, this file accompanies you through the process of V-REP installation along all the packages needed for a working YouBot environment. With the steps in the guide you will be able to create a ROS workspace, all the code downloaded from the repository than must be located into /src folder.

Then after having downloaded all the packages that are in the master folder of the GitHub repository to be able to compile the environment you must obtain python-pip, imutils, open-cv, e-band local planner, navigation stack of ROS, FlexBE App, laser_scan_matcher and cv_bridge. These tools can be obtained with the installation command of ROS:

$ sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-[name of the package]

You should then place the states folder downloaded from GitHub in the right states folder that creates when you download the FlexBE app (folder is inside flexbe_behaviour_engine, behaviors should be autonomously detected by the app, for development purpose they are in the behaviors folder.

Some problems have been pointed out when implementing the state machine due to the in-development stage of FlexBE tool. The major one arises during the saving procedure of a new behaviour. To do so it is advisable to disconnect the state machine from the ROSservice through the Configuration panel and then save the new behaviour.

Next step to perform is to enable the depth sensor of the Kinect, some changes are needed on the simulation scene, you can find it in the GitHub repository it is called youbot_CORNERS.ttt, so when launching simulation please use this scene as the default one. Then, it is also required some additions on the vrep code, you can find the needed changes in the guide of rgbd slam, please pay attention to this changes. Then, to complete the conversion, replace the file named vrep_youbot.launch that you find inside vrep_youbot_plugin/launch with the one you find in /Additions folder of the GitHub repository. Finally, final step is to update the URDF models that are meant to describe the system. Navigate into the following path:

computer/opt/ROS/indigo/share/youbot_description/robots

and substitute the file youbot.urdf.xacro with the one you find in /Additions folder. The code was tested in several devices so the re usability is quite confirmed, however, if something is missing during the installation please refer to the missing package and search it with a search engine, you should be able to find all the needed instructions.