Udacity Robotic Software NanoDegree Final Project

Home Service Robot

Introduction

The goal of this project is to program a robot that can autonomously map an environment and navigate to pick and drop virtual objects.The tasks involved in the project are as follows:

• Design and build simple simulation world with Gazebo Building Editor
• Genereate the map of the environement by using gmapping SLAM package
• Use the ROS navigation stack and command the robot to go to different desired positions using 2D Nav Goal
• create C++ node named 'pick_objects' that drives the robot to specified pickup and dropoff zones
• create C++ node name add_markers that keeps track of robot pose by subscribing to robot odometry and publishes markers to rviz at specific locations.
• estabilish a communication between pickup node and add_marker node to compelte require Home Service Robot implementation.

Motivation

To consolidate the robotic concepts learned in the Udacity Robotics Nanodegree and get a hands-on experience of working with C++, ROS, Gazebo simulation enviroment. To be specific, it is mainly test and improve ROS abilities and skills to setting and fine tune parameters,communicating between different nodes of different packages, creating C++ nodes, publising and subscribing to different topics and writing launch files.

Prerequisites and Dependencies

1.Install Gazebo>=7.0 and ROS kinetic in Linux.

2. Cmake>=3.0 , gcc/g++>=5.4 and xterm

3. following ros packages are used for this project and process of installing them are detailed below

1. gmapping The gmapping package provides laser-based slam, as a ROS node called slam_gmapping. slam_gmapping is used to create 2-D occupancy grid map of the environment from laser and pose data collected by mobile robot. In this project,it is used to generate map of the simulated Gazebo world.With the gmapping_demo.launch file, you can easily perform SLAM and build a map of the environment with a robot equipped with laser range finder sensors or RGB-D cameras.
2. turtlebot_teleop With the keyboard_teleop.launch file, you can manually control a robot using keyboard commands.
3. turtlebot_rviz_launchers With the view_navigation.launch file, you can load a preconfigured rviz workspace. You’ll save a lot of time by launching this file, because it will automatically load the robot model, trajectories, and map for you.
4. turtlebot_gazebo With the turtlebot_world.launch you can deploy a turtlebot in a gazebo environment by linking the world file to it.

Build and Run the project

1.Clone and Intialize the catkin workspace.

   $ mkdir -p catkin_ws/src
   $ cd catkin_ws/
   $ cd catkin_ws/src
   $ catkin_init_workspace
   $ git clone https://github.com/RamCharanThota/Udacity_RND_HomeServiceRobot.git

2. Build the packages.

 $ cd ../
 $ catkin_make
 $ source devel/setup.bash

3. Run and launch HomeService robot

 $ cd catkin_ws/src/scripts/
 $ chmod +x ./home_service.sh
 $ ./home_service.sh

Results