OmnirobRobin

OmnirobRobin is a omnidirectional robot using mecanum wheels. The robot was developed at the Institute of Robotics at Johannes Kepler University Linz.

Installation (wstool from source)

By checking out from our repositories, you can always stay up to date with the latest version. Use the following commands to check out the OmnirobRobin stacks:

1. Install ROS software (ROS Indigo with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS is recommended, for using the ROS version of Gazebo5 the 64 bit version is required) at http://www.ros.org/wiki/ROS/Installation, please select Ubuntu platform.

2. Use ros-indigo-desktop-full packages at the installation page (recommended)

3. Create a catkin workspace (see Catkin Tutorial)

4. Install wstool (if not already installed) (see wstool Tutorial)

5. Switch to catkin workspace into src folder

   cd ~/catkin_ws/src

6. Add OmnirobRobin repositories

   wstool init
   wstool set omnirob_robin --git https://github.com/robinJKU/omnirob_robin.git
   wstool update

7. Install Kinect driver: Step 3 from the IAI Kinect2 Install procedure: IAI Kinect2 install

8. Build catkin workspace (see Catkin Tutorial)

   cd ..
   catkin_make

9. Remove old Gazebo version

   sudo apt-get remove ros-indigo-gazebo-ros

10. Install newest Gazebo (from the tutorial Gazebo 5 Install)

    wget -O /tmp/gazebo5_install.sh http://osrf-distributions.s3.amazonaws.com/gazebo/gazebo5_install.sh; sudo sh /tmp/gazebo5_install.sh

11. Install ros-gazebo dependencies and ros-control

    sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-gazebo5-* ros-indigo-ros-control ros-indigo-ros-controllers

    The Gazebo5 packages are only avaiable for 64 bit versions of Ubuntu.

Getting Started

Bringup the real robot

Launch a roscore on the task board

roscore

On the RTAI board type

export ROS_MASTER_URI=http://192.168.1.100:11311

and start the Hardware interfaces

/usr/work/bin/omnirob_driver

now the robot is ready to receive commands.

Bringup the Gazebo simulation

To start the simulation for the OmnirobRobin robot type:

roslaunch omnirob_robin_bringup simulation.launch

This starts Gazebo and loads all relevant nodes for controlling the robot, the simulated Kinect and the simulated laserscanner.

There are custom AR markers in the omnirob_robin_gazebo package, to use them add the following line to your .bashrc:

“export GAZEBO_MODEL_PATH=~/catkin_ws/src/omnirob_robin_gazebo/models”