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.

Installing starmac-ros-pkg

As with the rest of starmac-ros-pkg this tutorial is currently under development.

Requirements

• 2 machines (Actually, the second machine is optional, strictly speaking. You can run the simulation, as shown in the next tutorial, with just the ground station machine)

  • #1 - Ground Station, user@ground
  • #2 - Flyer, starmac@flyer
• Each machine running Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid or 10.10 Maverick on i386 or amd64

  • See http://robotics.ccny.cuny.edu/wiki/AscTec/Ubuntu for an excellent guide to installing Ubuntu 10.10 on an AscTec Pelican.

• git and hg (Mercurial) version control clients installed

• Both machines on the same network and configured per ROS/NetworkSetup

• SSH set up such that user@ground can SSH to starmac@flyer passwordless (required for roslaunch)

• Time synchronization between ground and flyer machines using, e.g., chrony

• Ground machine equipped with a joystick compatible with joystick_drivers. See joy/Tutorials/ConfiguringALinuxJoystick. Development is done with a Logitech Extreme3D Pro.

• ROS diamondback installed per guide. Recommended variants:

  • ground machine: "Desktop-Full" (ros-diamondback-desktop-full)

  • flyer: "ROS-Base" (ros-diamondback-ros-base)

• Highly Recommended: Complete the ROS Tutorials. At minimum:

  • ROS/Tutorials/NavigatingTheFilesystem

  • ROS/Tutorials/CreatingPackage

  • ROS/Tutorials/BuildingPackages

  • ROS/Tutorials/UnderstandingNodes

  • ROS/Tutorials/UnderstandingTopics

  • ROS/Tutorials/UsingRxconsoleRoslaunch

  • ROS/Tutorials/NavigatingTheWiki

• When you have a ROS question, first check the Support page and be aware of the FAQ and there is also the new, but quickly growing, http://answers.ros.org. If you have a starmac-ros-pkg question it is probably best asked on the starmac-ros-pkg mailing list.

Installing dependencies

The installation steps in this section should be performed on both the ground machine and the flyer.

• Create a directory to store downloaded stacks:

   1 mkdir ~/ros

• Add this directory to your ROS_PACKAGE_PATH (see ROS/EnvironmentVariables) by editing ~/.bashrc

System Dependencies

The following will (hopefully) pull in all the packages that are required and available as .debs:

   1 sudo apt-get install build-essential ros-diamondback-geometry ros-diamondback-common-msgs ros-diamondback-diagnostics ros-diamondback-camera-drivers ros-diamondback-image-common ros-diamondback-vision-opencv ros-diamondback-joystick-drivers ros-diamondback-roshpit ros-diamondback-perception-pcl ros-diamondback-pr2-controllers ros-diamondback-asctec-drivers

When running rosmake --rosdep-install below, if you end up with errors like:

[rospack] couldn't find dependency [control_toolbox] of [flyer_controller]

...then the above list should be modified to include whatever package you end up having to install. The general steps to figure out what to install can be found at this FAQ entry.

Installing starmac-ros-pkg

First check out the stack:

cd ~/ros
hg clone https://bitbucket.org/bouffard/starmac-ros-pkg
cd starmac-ros-pkg
hg update -r version-0.0.1 # switch revisions

Now you can start to compile,

   1 cd ~/ros
   2 rosmake starmac_ground starmac_flyer --rosdep-install

Note that this only compiles the starmac_ground and starmac_flyer stacks and their dependencies (which will include the starmac_common stack). These are the basic stacks required to continue with the next tutorial, which introduces how to fly a quadrotor in simulation.

First Flight

Next: Continue to starmac-ros-pkg/Tutorials/First Flight.