AutoNOMOS Simulation Project

This project is looking to create a simulation for AutoNOMOS mini. With which one can be involved without requiring the actual car, and in case of requiring it with a few steps we can test our code on the real hardware.

Setup Gazebo and ROS

Make sure you have ROS installed with Gazebo 2 (which is the default version). Full instalation instructions can be seen here.

sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-desktop-full

This project has been tested with:

...
* /rosdistro: indigo
* /rosversion: 1.11.21
...
Gazebo multi-robot simulator, version 2.2.3

Before we can test the packages contained in this project, we should install the following packages to work with Gazebo and ROS (Indigo version, in case of requiring other version, see here):

sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-gazebo-ros-pkgs ros-indigo-gazebo-msgs ros-indigo-gazebo-plugins ros-indigo-gazebo-ros-control

Be sure to always source the appropriate ROS setup file, which for Indigo is done like so:

source /opt/ros/indigo/setup.bash

You might want to add it to your ~/.bashrc

And finally you can test the environment have been properly setup and built with a rosrun command:

roscore & rosrun gazebo_ros gazebo

This command should open Gazebo GUI with nothing inside. At viewing topics with rostopic list, we should see within the lists topics such as:

/gazebo/link_states
/gazebo/model_states
/gazebo/parameter_descriptions
/gazebo/parameter_updates
/gazebo/set_link_state
/gazebo/set_model_state

Additional help can be found here

Setup project

Once we have our environment ready. We need to download or clone this project.

git clone https://github.com/EagleKnights/AutoNOMOS.git

Once we had the files in our computer, we need to build the workspace with catkin build.

The last step is again to source the appropiate ROS setup file. Within our downloaded folder, execute source devel/setup.bash.

If we don't have catkin installed, execute sudo apt-get install python-catkin-tools (see here)

Opening Gazebo GUI

With the previous steps completed. We can open a Gazebo window with the simulation car, using the following command.

roslaunch autonomos_gazebo_control autonomos_gazebo_control.launch

The Gazebo GUI should appear, now with the car in the center.

Now, if we execute rostopic list, we should see within the lists topics something like:

...
/app/camera/rgb/image_raw
/app/camera/rgb/image_raw/compressed
...
/autonomos/steer/steer_position_controller/command
/autonomos/steer/steer_position_controller/pid/parameter_descriptions
...
/cmd_vel
/gazebo/link_states
/gazebo/model_states
...

Sending control actions to the car

The basic control of the car is described next.

Steering:

To control the steering we need to send radians in a range from -0.5 to 0.5 to the steer joint, in a std_msgs/Float64 message. This can be done with the following command:

rostopic pub -1 /autonomos/steer/steer_position_controller/command std_msgs/Float64 "data: -0.5"

Velocity

In the case of velocity, we need to send values from 0.01 to 0.2 to the /cmd_vel topic, which receives a geometry_msgs/Twist data type, an example is the following:

rostopic pub -r 1 /cmd_vel geometry_msgs/Twist  '{linear:  {x: -0.02, y: 0.0, z: 0.0}, angular: {x: 0.0,y: 0.0,z: 0.0}}'

Any improvements are welcome