RobAIR2013-RICM4-Groupe2-Suivi

The Team

This team is composed of two 4th year Polytech Grenoble students, in System & Networks specialty.

The members of this team are Nicolas Afonso and Simon Planès.

You can contact us via our mailing list: link.

Project objectives

Our project is a part of the RobAIR2013 project.

The shared project

RobAIR is a shared project with two others schools:

• ENSIMAG
• Superior Pole Design of Villefontaine

The project consists of the development of a telepresence robot used for museum tours. It is a low cost robot (well below the maket price). The platform and software used for this robot are extensible and follow the OSOHOD2 main lines: open software, open hardware, open design, open data.

Our subproject objectives

We are responsible for the implementation of the ROS environnement in this project. We had to:

• learn the ROS principles
• learn the Python language
• implement ROS nodes in the lego NXT in order to control it
• implement ROS architecture for RobAir (node for the Lidar, the Kinect ... and the topics between these sensors)
• make sufficent documentation for the next RobAir's students (solid fondations to start quickly without loosing time searching the same information as we did)

Technologies used

• ROS
• Python

Material

For the full material list, follow this link (Bonus: photo gallery)

Progress of the project

We have nearly 3 months to complete this project, starting the 14th of January and presented to our professor the 11th of January.

WEEK 1: from January 14th to January 20th

• We discovered the global project,the different teams and objectives.
• We underlined the difficult points
  • The communication between the differents teams (synchronisation between different schedules, places to work: IMAG or Polytech')
  • What our tutors expects really from us: the project seems to be huge, with a lot of expectations and work to do
• Installation of ROS and first steps with tutorials.

WEEK 2: from January 21st to January 27th

• We organized a meeting with the 3I4 and RICM4 students. During this meeting, we talked about what everyone understood of this project and what everyone's objectives are.
• We met with the three students from Pole Design de Villefontaine and they told us what they have been working on for the last month.
• A meeting minute is available here.
• Meeting with Rémi Barraquand (thanks !) at INRIA to talk about ROS
  • introduction to the ROS principles and architecture
  • useful ROS commands and Tools
  • demonstation: how to make a package and a virtual robot (with Rviz tool), controlled by keyboard or autonomous depending on its driver mode, generating a map during its navigation

WEEK 3: from January 28th to February 3rd

• Talk with Thomas Calmant and Joao Claudio Américo who worked on RobAIR before with Didier Donsez on another robotic subject
  • They warn us about the difficulty to use ROS, they abandoned this robotics development architecture during their project
• We continued to follow the ROS tutorials

WEEK 4: from January 4th to February 10th

• First meeting with the RICM5 working on this project
  • They presented to us their first architecture for the project
  • They divided up into different groups, each one on charge of a RICM4 team
    • Elisabeth Paz and Arthur Alexandre were our tutors
• We finish the basical ROS tutorial and make our firsts practical tests

WEEK 5: from February 11th to February 17th

• Meeting with the RICM5 working on this project
• We start the intermediate level ROS tutorials
  • a first interactive ROS node: hosted on our git

WEEK 6: from February 18th to February 22nd

• We had the idea (finally!) to set up mailing lists to improve communication between the different groups of the project
  • robair2013@googlegroups.comfor all the Polytech's stakeholders
  • ricm4-robair2013@googlegroups.com for the RICM4
  • ricm5-robair2013@googlegroups.com for the RICM5
• Before testing on the final robot, we decided to make in practise the different ROS principles we learned the weeks before
  • We will try to take the control of the Lego Mindstorm NXT robot using ROS and Python scripts
    • Searching for documentation and driver

WEEKS 7 and 8: from March 4th to March 15th

• Searching for a nxt ROS node in order to give us the ability to communicate with this robot
  • nxt-ros is not working on our ROS environments (Ubuntu 12.10 / ROS Groovy). After some researches and tries, nxt-ros is only compatible with old configurations: ROS electric (v5) / Ubuntu 11.10 and lower.
  • nxt-python is working on our ROS environments. We will wrote Python scripts to control the nxt.

WEEK 9: from March 18th to March 22nd

• We assisted at the RICM5 final presentation
• Thanks to the help of a great python programmer (Salem Harrache) we are now able to control the nxt over a ROS architecture :)

WEEK 10: from February 25th to February 29nd

• One of the Ensimag group needed the Lidar
  • We download the lidar node, accessible from our environment sudo apt-get install ros-groovy-laser-drivers
  • The next is simple, we just have to follow the specific tutorial on ros website.
  • We played with the lidar, using the data its node published on the /scan topic

WEEK 11: from April 1st to April 5th

• easter: brake !

WEEK 12: from April 8th to April 11th

• Final presentation: April, 11th 2:15pm to 15:40pm for all the RobAir's RICM4 groups
  • For the documents, please refer you to the document section (below)

Related documents

• The Software Requirements Specification (SRS) can be found here.
• The global project's page can be found here.
• The UML of this project can be found here.
• Our ROS tutorial on wiki-air: here
• ROS code for controling the robot : TO COME
• Presentation slides: TO COME
• Our project flyer: TO COME
• Our project report: TO COME