Communicating with TurtleBot from Two Computers
I bought a TurtleBot and am really excited about getting it to perform various tasks for me. As a first, (relatively) simple task, I'd like to get it to periodically check whether my mail has been delivered each day (we have the "slot in the door" type of "mailbox," so it needs to navigate to the door and determine if there is a new pile of mail lying there) and send me an email once the mail arrives.
I'm totally new to ROS though, so I'm still going through the TurtleBot tutorials. I'm on the step in which you build a SLAM map of your house so you can subsequently program TurtleBot to navigate the map autonomously.
However, I have a problem - my desktop machine (Ubuntu 10.04) is in my bedroom, so I'm unable to see what the TurtleBot is doing in order to teleop navigate him around the other rooms in the house via RViz. I can watch the output from the Kinect's RGB camera, but due to the position in which it's mounted, I can't see all obstacles that he might run into.
The solution I came up with was to install the ros-electric-turtlebot-desktop package on a modest netbook (1.5ghz dual core, 1gb ram). I would then run the keyboard teleop from the netbook while I followed the TurtleBot around my house, with the gmapping app running on the TurtleBot's netbook and RViz and the map_server running on my desktop machine.
Is this even possible? If not, is there an alternative solution?
As a secondary question, if you believe this project is too complex for a beginner, could you please recommend a simpler alternative beyond the introductory tutorials on the TurtleBot wiki that would be more practical for me? I would really appreciate it - I am so eager to learn to use my TurtleBot but have been frustrated by my lack of knowledge.
Thanks in advance!
