Sunday 24 June 2012

Ubuntu 12.4

After a few weeks of no time and frustration with wireless not working and slow overall performance. I upgraded to Ubuntu 12.4 and   using the LXDE desktop
the speed and usability improved wireless works even in headless mode. I then did a source install of ROS fuetre the only change i had to make was remove the j8 from the make command. part 2 of the install kept failing with dependence issues but using the new rosdep install <name> helped resolve most errors. I have a issue with dummy threads error but it appears to be only a slight inconvenience. The main stumbling block is yaml-cpp is required but the source install i did is not recognized so  navigation wont install at the moment. But at least i can drive the Qbot around using the arbotix controller and the turtlebot joy stick works. sound is not working and the web cam under cheese only shows a blank screen. Overall not a bad result for the weekend


Peter

Sunday 13 May 2012

Progress Update

The last ROS install and Ubuntu 11.10 was very slow and unworkable after a fresh install and running ROS Fuerte with no GUI installed at all its runs much faster the only problem is the usb wi fi is not working. After a reading a few blogs and experience with network usage we chose to install a wireless hub and run Qbot on his own network. This has solved a few problems ROS has to be installed from source so the extra speed is welcome at the moment we came run the arbotix and control from cmd_vel  and the controllrGUI from a remote computer. We have added a Xbox wireless controller the ROS joystick node is still causing a problem.
On the hardware front we added a head and stereo cameras and changed the layout to make it smaller the wireless hub run of the 5 volt supply we need to change the reg to a switching type with at least 3 amps the servos run on 9 volts to keep the servos cool .later we will switch to 12 volt for the higher torque



Saturday 25 February 2012

Software

The software is Ubuntu 11.10 instructions are here 
The software for the arbotix is here
Installing ROS is the hard part you have to do a source install follow the instructions here select a ROS-base install.
I spent a lot of time trying to compile other features like robot_model that resulted in failure (after about 6 hours). I was able to run Roscore and the Arbotix driver on the beagleBoard and move_base and the URDF on a remote computer with Rviz and teleop or using navigation in rviz. I still need to compile UVC_cam to compile
(opencv causes errors) and install festival TTS

Hardware

Qbot uses a arbotix MCU and a LN298 motor driver the motors are 100:1 gear motors with built in encoders. The arbotix also will control the dynamixel servos in the pan and tilt when finished. The BeagleBoard runs ubuntu 11.10 and ROS electric. The whole lot is powered by a 7 amp/hr SLA battery

Friday 10 February 2012

Beagle_bot the start

Beagle_bot is a sort of Qbo copy
The features we want to incorporate are
  • Low power usage
  • android control
  • face tracking
  • Robbie_AI
Computer control is done with a BeagleBoard and a Arbotix MCU
running Ubuntu 11.4 and ros electric