Robotics Nanodegree

This repo contains the related projects for the Udacity's Robotics Software Engineer Nanodegree.

The project was divided in

• Part 1: Build My World: Designed a Gazebo World Environment for the upcoming parts.
• Part 2: Go Chase It: Designed and built a mobile robot, house it inside the world and then programed it with c++ Nodes in ROS to chase a white ball.
• Part 3: Where Am I: Used the Adaptive Monte Carlo Localization algorithm in ROS to localize the robot.
• Part 4: Map My World: Deployed RTAB-Mapping on the robot to simulate 2D and 3D maps of the environment.

Go Chase It Feature (Part 1 & 2)

This project involves designing and building a mobile robot that is capable of chasing and following white colored balls.

Structure

There are two packages within this repository:

1. my_robot

Defines mobile robot URDF as well as the world.

2. ball_chaser

Contains 2 nodes, one responsible for locating the position of the white ball, and the second for sending the respective command to follow the white ball.

Build and Run the Project:

1. git clone the repository inside your catkin workspace

2. Source the workspace source devel/setup.bash

3. Launch world and robot roslaunch my_robot world.launch

4. To make the robot chase the white ball, open another terminal, navigate to your catking worspace, source it, and then execute: roslaunch ball_chaser ball_chaser.launch

Where Am I Feature (Part 3)

This feature uses ROS AMCL package to accurately localize a mobile robot inside a map in the Gazebo simulation environments.

Previous Installation

sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-navigation

sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-map-server

sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-move-base

sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-amcl

Testing

Teleop Node

You could use teleop node to control your robot and observe it localize itself in the environment.

Open another terminal and launch the teleop script:

rosrun teleop_twist_keyboard teleop_twist_keyboard.py

2D Navigation Goal

Click the 2D Nav Goal button in the toolbar, then click and drag on the map to send the goal to the robot. It will start moving and localize itself in the process.

Map My World Feature (Part 4)

To test the rtabmap_ros package, launch the world.

Then launch mapping.launchto start RTABMAP. Then run the teleop_key package in order to start creating the map.

At the end you must result with something like this:

And the final map, should be something like this:

Database must be located at ~/.ros/rtabmap.db

To analyze it, run rtabmap-databaseViewer src/my_robot/db/rtabmap.db

Notes

It's recommended to update and upgrade your environment before running the code. sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade -y