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RPI 3 controlled robot and ROS

I have a pan tilt head, video cam, sound visualizer, microphones, speakers, some other sensors; all connected to an Raspberry Pi 3. how can I make this simple robot ROS compatible? is there such thing? How can I use ROS on this robot? my point is that I want to learn ROS using this home-made robot. do you think it's possible? best -murat

Asked by MuratAhmetGenc on 2016-08-14 16:44:15 UTC

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You can run ROS on the RPi. If your hardware is all custom, then you'll probably have to spend some time learning how to write ROS nodes to read sensor values and publish them, and also to listen on topics to desired actuator positions and command the servos. And you'll probably want to learn some OpenCV to interact with the camera. All of this is doable. It depends on your goals, though. There is sizeable amount of off-the-shelf code in ROS for dealing with navigation. If your robot does not move, then you might be getting less out of ROS than otherwise.

That said, the main benefit to ROS is the ability to decouple the various pieces of code controlling your robot through ROS's loosely-coupled messaging framework. There is a sizeable learning curve, though, so you have to invest some time before you see the benefits.

Asked by Mark Rose on 2016-08-15 11:05:49 UTC

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I see. thanks Mark.

Asked by MuratAhmetGenc on 2016-08-15 16:27:54 UTC

I probably also shortchanged ROS a little because I did not mention moveit, a motion planning framework which has been integrated with ROS. I don't have experience with moveit, but I have heard it is CPU-intensive, which might be iffy on the RPi. YMMV

Asked by Mark Rose on 2016-08-16 11:16:28 UTC

And I don't want you to get the impression that all of this will be custom nodes. Depending on your hardware, you may be able to find existing ROS nodes for sensors and actuators. My robot has an Arduino as well, so I use ros_arduino_bridge to publish sensors and respond to motion messages.

Asked by Mark Rose on 2016-08-16 11:18:02 UTC

I think I will study all the tutorials on the official site and understand the logic first. I'm assuming that I can use a simulator without using an actual robot first. if not,I have access to a ROS compatible robot, I'm going to work on it. then, once I got enough knowledge, I'll work on my own.thx

Asked by MuratAhmetGenc on 2016-08-18 02:54:22 UTC