ROS

Introduction

	The Robot Operating System ROS hosted and maintained by Willow Garage is a free meta operating system for mobile robots. This page describes the adaption of Robotino C++ API2 to ROS.	Package links robotino - Contains the essential packages for communicating with Robotino. robotino_grappler - If you own a Grappler then this stack provides packages to manipulate it with ROS. robotino_kinect - If you own a Kinect sensor then this stack provides packages to explore the possibilities of Robotino and Kinect in ROS.

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Installation

You will need a Linux (preferable Ubuntu) PC in order to run ROS. As we need much computational power for SLAM and especially path planning Robotinos PC104 is overstrained. So we use a laptop or desktop PC communicating to Robotino via wireless.

Install ROS. How to do this read the ROS installation instructions.

Install API2 packages on Robotino.

Get the Robotino ROS drivers:

svn co http://svn.openrobotino.org/robotino-ros-pkg/trunk/ robotino-ros-pkg

Catkin

svn co http://svn.openrobotino.org/robotino-ros-pkg/trunk/catkin-pkg/ robotino-ros-pkg

Put the robotino-ros-pkg into the ROS_PACKAGE_PATH. If everything is setup correctly you can run

rosmake robotino

Hardware

What you really need to use ROS in a meaningful way is a laser rangefinder for Robotino.