Power-up and devices

• Main robot power on
• Robot CPU power on
• Ensure the laser toggle switch is at state (WHICH ONE WORKS?)
• Manually power on the Cannon G7 camera (press power button on top, lens will not open until software commands)

Networking setup

• theakston: 192.168.10.101
• bart: 192.168.10.10
• make sure you can ping and ssh to to the robot

User accounts

• may need to run as dpmeger ... some people know password if needed, please keep that account safe

Hardware drivers, manual control

• roslaunch powerbot powerbot_teleop.launch
• Logitech remote joystick should now work to control the robot
  • Left top trigger is dead-man switch
  • Left joystick is for turning
  • Right joystick is for forward and back

Building map of previously unknown place

• roslaunch 2dnav_powerbot 2dnav_powerbot_local.launch (NOTE: it matters that you put local here, the other one will not work unless a map already exists)
• resulting files stored as map.yaml in maps dir of 2dnav_powerbot package
• can move the robot in this mode by joystick control, move the robot around until the map is built
• (options) a number of autonomous explorer nodes can be selected from -> they live in ubc-ros-pkg/navigation/navigation_goals
• (option)

Navigation in known map

• roslaunch 2dnav_powerbot 2dnav_powerbot.launch (NOTE: no local now)
• Depends on good map that has been created by previous method
• Does not localize the robot in the map initially, so you must:
  • use rviz to publish /initialpose messages until the robot is nearly localized
  • subscribe to the /base_scan topic and make sure the laser aligns well with the walls
  • when its very close, drive the robot a bit with the joystick or by sending auto-goals until things are nicely converged

Commanding the robot using ROS topics / rviz

• Switch theakston's ROS master to point at bart
  • export ROS_MASTER_URI=http://bart:11311
• Subscribe to the map topic (FORGOT WHAT IS SPECIFIC NAME?)
• Set the goal topic to /most_base_simple/goal (NOTE: ROBOT WILL MOVE AUTOMATICALLY NOW... CAREFUL!)

-- DavidMeger - 21 Nov 2012