Note: This Tutorial is designed for use only with robots purchased before June 2014. The current packages are in ric

(!) Please ask about problems and questions regarding this tutorial on answers.ros.org. Don't forget to include in your question the link to this page, the versions of your OS & ROS, and also add appropriate tags.

Network setup for controlling the Lizi robots from a remote machine

Description: This tutorial cover the required setup for controlling the Lizi robots from a remote computer

Tutorial Level: INTERMEDIATE

Next Tutorial: Programming the Lizi robot micro-controller

In order to operate one or more Lizi robots from a remote machine (base station) one should first make sure that the Lizi robots and the base station computer are connected to the same network.

Each robot should have a unique IP address. Lets say our WiFi network name is lizi_wifi. In the following example we will choose the IP addresses to match the Lizi id. So for Lizi with id=1, the IP will be 192.168.0.101. A Lizi with id=2, the IP will be 192.168.0.102 and so on. The base station IP will have IP 192.168.0.100.

To set a specific and known IP follow these steps:

1. Enter the "Network Connections" Settings.

2. Go to "Wireless" tab, select the "lizi_wifi" network and click "Edit...".

4. Go to "IPv4 Settings tab, change the Method to Manual and add a new address.

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5. Disconnect and re-connect from the lizi_wifi network.

Do the following steps for each Lizi robot and for the base station computer.

The last step is to make sure each Lizi robot have a correct lizi environment setting file. The file are located in lizi_robot/lizi/config. For example, for Lizi with id=1 and IP 192.168.0.101, edit the lizi_env.sh to look like this:

   1 #!/bin/sh
   2 export ROS_HOSTNAME="192.168.0.101"
   3 export ROS_IP="192.168.0.101"
   4 . ~/catkin_ws/devel/setup.sh
   5 exec "$@"

To verify the setup, you can test the connection by sending ping requests from the base station computer to each one of the robots.

$ ping 192.168.0.101

You should see something like:

PING 192.168.0.101 (192.168.0.101) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 192.168.0.101: icmp_req=1 ttl=64 time=4.10 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.0.101: icmp_req=2 ttl=64 time=2.61 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.0.101: icmp_req=3 ttl=64 time=3.93 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.0.101: icmp_req=4 ttl=64 time=30.5 ms

Wiki: lizi_robot/Tutorials/Network setup for controlling the Lizi robots from a remote machine (last edited 2014-07-02 05:32:44 by yamgeva)