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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.

Robot bring-up

For the following sections we will use the ARMadillo robot for all the examples but the same usage will be the same for other robots, just replace 'armadillo' with your robot name, e.g. 'lizi', 'komodo'.

Safety first! - Before using your robot please carefully read the safety instructions on your robot manual. You can download a copy of your robot manual under your robot ROS package wiki page. For example, the ARMadillo robot manual can be downloaded from the robotican_armadillo wiki page.

In order to bring up your robot launch your robot main launch file. Open a new terminal (Ctrl+Alt+t) and run:

$ roslaunch robotican_armadillo armadillo.launch

Thats it, your robot is up!

By default not all sensors and capabilities are initiated with the above launch command. In order to select the sensors and capabilities you want to initiate you can add arguments to the above launch command. The available arguments and their default state for each robot can be found under the robot package wiki page. For example, for the ARMadillo robot, the following arguments can be used for sensors selection:

Front_camera – Front RGB color camera

Rear_camera – Rear RGB color camera

Lidar – Laser scanner sensor

GPS – GPS sensor

IMU – IMU 9-DOF sensor

URF – Ultrasonic range finders

Kinect2 – The Kinect 2 RGB-D camera (mounted on the pan-tilt system on top of the robot)

Softkinetic– The SoftKinetic RGB-D camera (mounted above the arm gripper)

and the following arguments can be used for capabilities selection:

robot_localization - Launch the robot_localization EKF state estimation node. By default, the only input sensor is the robot odometry. If you want to add more sensors or edit the node parameters you can modify the robotican/robotican_common/launch/robot_localization.launch file.

Moveit - Setting this argument to 'true' will load the robot MoveIt interface. See section Arm manipulation for more details and extra related arguments.

Gazebo - Setting this argument to 'true' will load the Gazebo simulation environment and bring-up the robot. See the Bring-up a robot in the gazebo simulation environment tutorial for more details and extra related arguments.

Twist_mux - Setting this argument to 'true' will load the twist_mux Twist multiplexer. See the Teleoperation tutorial for more details and extra related arguments. This argument is set to true by default.

RQT - Setting this argument to 'true' will launch the rqt GUI.

For example, if you want to launch the robot with a front camera and laser scanner, use the following command:

$ roslaunch robotican_armadillo armadillo.launch lidar:=true front_camera:=true

Note: The order for the arguments doesn't matter.