I’ve decided to use ROS (Robot Operating System) for my PiWars project as it’s industry standard and this is an excellent excuse to learn it. For some reason I thought that ROS was a realtime operating system, turns out it is a bunch of libraries and services that run on top of existing operating systems, though that’s selling it short. It’s been around since 2007 and there are *loads* of libraries available for it, I’m hoping to use these to simplify navigation and control of the arms. There are loads of kinematics libraries available so I’m hoping to stand on the shoulders of giants here.

I’ve been playing around with the tutorials and have messages going from one Raspberry Pi to another so thought I’d share how I got here.

Setup/Prerequisites

I’m using the image provided by Ubiquity Robotics, it works and already supports stereo imagery using the StereoPi so seemed daft not to use it. Once you have two Raspberry Pis running with this image get them both on your network. If you’re running Windows you may also want to install Bonjour Print Services, this includes the same service that the Raspberry Pis use to advertise to each other on the network and means you can find them easier by host name.

Tutorials

The ROS tutorials can be found here, If you’re wanting to do ROS development on a Windows machine this may be of use. It’s instructions for installing ROS in the Windows Subsystem for Linux, Docker or VM.

The specific combo of tutorials I used are the Python pub/sub and “running on multiple machines” tutorials, I ran the former on each Pi first to make sure they were working then followed the steps in the latter to set the robot as the master node, then run the listener on the robot and talker on the controller. You can do it either way around, I just like the idea of sending messages from controller to the robot. 🙂

Python Publisher/Subscriber Tutorial
Running on Multiple Machines

If you follow these along at home you will need to go back a few steps as to run the pub/sub tutorial you need to build a package, to do that you need to create and set up your workspace. The prerequisites for each tutorial are listed at the top of each article so easy to backtrack.

Learnings

So, I can send “Hello, World!” from one machine to another. Woo I hear you say! It doesn’t sound like much but from here I can use these concepts to send and receive messages between controller and robot. For example, one node would publish sensor data, I would then have one or many listeners that use that data. Another would listen for motor control signals, telemetry data, etc…

Next up, use the RedRobotics samples on the robot to enable remote control and basic telemetry back to the controller. This will just be the battery level to start with but that’s a very important thing to know as I trust you’ll agree.