[Tutorial] ROS and Raspberry Pi | Series for Beginners

tiffo · January 5, 2019, 3:58pm

Technically speaking there is no mention of any autopilot in my tutorial. But, as ROS (Robot Operating System) becomes more and more popular, I kinda felt like it was time to create a Tutorial for beginner that was actually fun to do (and watch, I hope).

So I decided to go for a real example. I had my Donkey Car (donkeycar.com) parked somewhere (too many things to do) and I thought that would have been a perfect robot to start with.

This video covers (it's long, but I wrote down the time marks in the description on YouTube):

setting up a Raspberry Pi 3 with an SD card image from Ubiquity Robotics, with ROS Kinetic installed.
installing ROS on Ubuntu
ROS master, ROS_MASTER_URI and ROS running on multiple platforms
Packages installation and creation
topics and messages
writing a script (publisher and subscriber) in Python
lots of fun outdoor

You are all welcome to contribute with your own packages!

CODE: Find the code on Github

CLICK HERE TO GO TO THE VIDEO ON YOUTUBE

james_pattison · January 5, 2019, 9:41pm

Great intro: really looking forward to the ROS series. I didn’t follow along with DonkeyCar, but if MAVROS is coming I’ll definitely jump onboard.

tiffo · January 6, 2019, 12:46am

Ardupilot is going to be included. We just need to cover the basics first. I thought that was easier to follow on a real example rather than on a gazebo simulation

james_pattison · January 6, 2019, 1:33am

For sure: I think that’s a good approach, as going too deep too quickly can be overwhelming.

I skipped DonkeyCar as it is basically just an iteration on good ol’ TurtleBot

Are you sticking with Kinetic throughout, or transitioning to Melodic?

Regards,

James

ppoirier · January 6, 2019, 4:50am

Yes it is a good start
It’s not easy to find an interesting project to dive into ROS, the donkey car is much more interesting than the turtles.

Btw the image for the RPI (ubiquity robotics) is the same as the http://stereopi.com/#main , so the kernel can process stereoscopic camera on the & pointcloud images (you need to run on a Pi Compute Module)…so bear in mind for future projects

james_pattison · January 6, 2019, 11:17am

https://dronee.aero/pages/lychee might be an option to get the cm3, 2 cameras and an autopilot all in a clean install

ppoirier · January 6, 2019, 11:57am

Yes James , this could be used as well, providing the camera trigger is correctly designed to work as stereoscopic.

tiffo · January 6, 2019, 6:50pm

I was thinking to Lychee too. They might be interested to send a free sample either. I will ask.
I thought that applying ROS to a real robot, as simple as a “snap-a-pi-on-a-car” could have been more entertaining (for me too) than using Gazebo. Plus there is the matter of distributing ROS on multiple platform that might be very tricky.

Here I call ROS experts to contribute to the series. If you want to suggest a topic (funny, a /topic…) or a video or a package you have developed, do let me know. You will be mentioned in the video. I love collaboration!

ppoirier · January 6, 2019, 9:34pm

Definitively revisit Aruco Code as a position estimator under ROS and remap the pose as Vision Position on Mavros. That can run on a PI and it can be used to control a quadcopter.

This is oubviously more advanced stuff and prerequisites are RQT , RVIZ and SITL (or Gazeboo). As you might say: step by step,thi iis a long journey, lets enjoy

tiffo · January 14, 2019, 2:51pm

The first video is going great, but I received lots of comments and questions that made me feel I have gone too fast.

So I decided to take a step back and divide the series is smaller, slower videos , where I guide step by step into the ROS concepts .

Episode #1: launching nodes, compiling packages, launch files, rosrun, roslaunch…

tiffo · January 21, 2019, 7:22pm

Episode2: Topics and rqt_graph

tiffo · January 27, 2019, 3:39pm

Episode3: How to create your first publisher node, using Python

tiffo · February 4, 2019, 2:34pm

Episode 4: How to create your first Suscriber node, using Python

tiffo · February 12, 2019, 5:32pm

How to define CUSTOM MESSAGES in ROS (Kinetic + catkin_make)

> Find all the episodes

tiffo · April 26, 2019, 10:30pm

tiffo · April 26, 2019, 10:32pm

tiffo · July 4, 2019, 2:52am

ton999 · July 5, 2019, 5:20pm

Hi Tiziano, you are awesome… I like your youtube tutorial. But it is better if you provide
Q &A and your email. It seems this kind of tutorial need special forum. My best regards.

tiffo · July 14, 2019, 2:00am

You can post questions in the comments or right here. I’ll do my best to answer