VisualizingRobotConsepts

This repo. was made to visualize robot consepts like Kinematics and ROS.

I'd like to use ROS2 as it is more mature at this point and since it is available on Ubuntu, Windows, and MacOS, whereas ROS1 is only available on Ubuntu. This will make it easier for students to use. The distro. of ROS2 I plan to use is Iron Irwini. For the first version, I'll program this using Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy). This is because Iron Irwini is only supported on Windows 10, and I have Windows 11. In the future I might consider making a docker container that can run my code on any OS. I'll be using rviz for the visualtzation, and the python programming language. The original CAD files for the h_bot robot were designed by Haris Jasarevic. They were provided as .iges files and were converted using FreeCad.

How to install on Ubuntu 22.04

• Install the ROS2 Iron Irwini distrobution globally following this guide.

NOTE: Please use the Debian package installation using apt instead of building from source, or installing from downloaded binary. The following steps for sourcing your environment will fail if you got this wrong.

• Clone this GitHub repo

git clone https://github.com/GjermundOstensvig/VisualizingRobotConsepts.git

Setup your sources by running the following command. After you've run this, every time you start a new terminal, it will automatically souce the correct files.

echo "source /opt/ros/iron/setup.bash # For ros2 iron environment (underlay) 
source /usr/share/colcon_argcomplete/hook/colcon-argcomplete.bash # For autocompleting colcon options" >> ~/.bashrc

To check that you have the correct distro installed of ROS, and to se that you sourced the ROS environment properly you can run this:

printenv | grep -i ROS_DISTRO

you should expec to see ROS_DISTRO=iron

Running the following will let you know that your ROS distro was installed in the correct loaction:

ls /opt/ros

You should expect to see the names of all installed ros distros. In my case that's humble and iron.

How to build

The following commands should create three new folders in addition to src called build, install, and log.

cd VisualizingRobotConsepts/ros2_ws/

colcon build

Once built, you can source your overlay:

echo "source ~/VisualizingRobotConsepts/ros2_ws/install/setup.bash # For my custom ros overlay" >> ~/.bashrc

To only build one package instead of all packages in the workspace, run:

colcon build --packages-select <package_name>

Running things

After successfully building and sourcing the overlay, you can run the following to run the my_joint_state_publisher node:

ros2 run robot_consepts_viz_pkg my_joint_state_publisher

Launching rviz and the joint state publisher gui:

ros2 launch robot_consepts_viz_pkg h_bot_gui.launch.py

To start the visualizer, run the following command:

rviz2

Helpful commands

NOTE: The examples below use the /joint_state topic as an example, but any topic will do.

See which topics that are active in your environment:

ros2 topic list

See how many publishers and subscribers are connected to a topic:

ros2 topic info /joint_states

Print messages that are being sent on a topic:

ros2 topic echo /joint_states