Connecting my Custom Robot to ROS
Hi All,
I wanted to get and idea of your thoughts on the best way to "connect"/use ROS with my own robot. I've long since written code/custom navigation for my robot which is fitted with the usual suspects (X&Y coordinates/Gyro/Sonar and IR range finders).
I'd like to have a play around with ROS but I'm not sure the best place to start?
My robot sends it a telemetry stream and accepts motion commands (et al). Do I some how interface with this stream on the PC - via the Server I'd built. Therefore I don’t actually need to worry about writing new code for the MPU. Or something else?
I'd really appreciate some guidance. Also would the SLAM stack work OOTB with Sonar data?
Many Thanks in Advance (Probably more questions to follow)
Mark
Okay still looking around - I found ros_comm. The initial entry point into the host PC for my robot is a serial port, but is then looked after by a server (TCP/IP)...is there something similar I can connect to this with? Then read in the data and slice it up into the various sensor parts?
rosbridge I'm guessing - then what would be the best place to break up the data and untimatly create a sonar based map? (Sorry partly answering - I think - my own questions as I go here??) Yes/No/Barking up the totally wrong tree?
from there rip up the sensor data and publish thus: http://www.ros.org/wiki/navigation/Tutorials/RobotSetup/Sensors?http://www.ros.org/wiki/navigation/Tutorials/RobotSetup
Can you give some more details of the code you have now? For example, if it currently pushes bits over a network socket to some listener, is it pushing all of the data (controls, sensors, etc.) or are there several different streams?
Yep - I have a server app which is basically not much more than a RS232 Port to Socket converter (I realize I could use rosserial here but I want to keep the svr my homebrew navigation apps use it). XML telemetry stream - sensors/position/control cmds etc back and fourth from the host PC to the bot
More info here - http://www.toeminator.com/Toeminator/HostControlSystem/HostControlSystem.htm (A bit out of date now...)