Peter Roos's profile - activity

Hi,

I would like to know that is it possible to give goalpoints to the move_base (by move_base/goal or move_base_simple/goal) without orientation.

I followed this tutorial: http://www.ros.org/wiki/navigation/Tutorials/SendingSimpleGoals

I've exchanged 'base_link' to 'map' in:

goal.target_pose.header.frame_id = "base_link";

because naturally, I have goalpoints in the map coordinate system.

This works, the robot moves from goalpoint to goalpoint as expected. However, every time it reaches it's destination, it will also turn to the map's x axis (mathematics conventional x axis, so the robot "points to the right"). I suppose this is becuase the tutorial sets an identity quaternion for orientation in the map frame. If I uncomment the line:

goal.target_pose.pose.orientation.w = 1.0;

then the code would not compile.

So basically I want my robot to just arrive to a goalpoint, it's orientation does not matter for me.

Hi,

I've been using ROS Fuerte since a few months. Recently I've installed ROS Groovy to see what's new. Installation was no problem on my Ubuntu 12.10 system. However, I can not use 'roslocate info' for installing packages. I usually installed stage, teleop_twist_keyboard, etc., with this method: roslocate info stage | rosws merge - (then source setup.bash, and call rosws update).

Output on my system:

rope@computer:$ roslocate info stage

rosinstall malformed for package stage

Hello,

I'm pretty new to robot programming, so I don't have much experience in this topic yet. My task at univerity is to compare using ROS to our Pioneer P3AT's default library called ARIA. My goal is to answer this question: if our project is to make this Pioneer P3AT follow a predefined path and make corrections by the incoming positions - provided by an iGPS system - if the robot doesn't follow the planned path (for example it skids), then do we benefit from using ROS, and ROSARIA (P2OS), or should we just stick with the AIRA libraries. Does programming in ROSARIA result in more general code that can be reused if we change the P3AT to a different robot? If I understand well, the ROSARIA is a wrapper around the ARIA packet; and P2OS is a "driver" for robots like the Pioneer P3AT.

What are the pros/cons?

Thank you in advance!

Continue:

Does ROS have a general open source controlling system like the Player/Stage, or is it only using ARIA? If I want to use some algorithm found on ROS.org in some package, will it use ARIA? How do I know which packages are 'compatible'. I started reading 'Programming Mobile Robots with ARIA and Player' by Amanda Whitbrook, it has cleared some points for me, but the book doesn't speak about ROS at all. So my question really is how does programming compare with or without ROS. With only ARIA, I use the ARIA C++ library, and that's all. If I use ROS, will I still use ARIA with some neat tools provided by this meta-operating system? Or will the programming procedure change?

Hi,

I've been wandering on the net for some info on this topic without success.

My confiusion comes from the fact that there are some theoretical writings on this topic, explaining the technology briefly and recommending it (again, theoretically), but on the other hand, I've read on forums that there is no performance difference. There are even posts about decreased performance. Some claim increased stability.

My Intel Core i5 2540M - as stated here - supports Intel VT-x and VT-d hardware assisted virtualization. I use the latest VirtualBox and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS to run ROS Fuerte.

Should I enable these technologies?

Hi,

Is it planned by the ROS community to provide packages for mainstream Linux distributions, like Fedora and OpenSuSe?

To me it's completely understandable, that Ubuntu is a recommded choice. However, I find setting ROS up on a non-Ubuntu system is really hard (I didn't succeed on Fedora 18, neither on OpenSuSe 12.3). In fact, I ended up creating a Ubuntu 12.04 LTS installation only for ROS Fuerte, which is quite redundant in my case.

As I see, in the last two years more and more people left the Ubuntu community - for numerous reasons we all know (Unity, Mir, outdated packages, privacy issues etc.).

Fedora has opened a feature plan for ROS, which is at 0% completion. For OpenSuSe, there are packaging efforts made by Spencer Jackson.

What about the OpenSuSe Build Service?

Hi,

I'm following the installation notes found on ros.org for Fedora - link

Last successful move:

rosinstall --catkin ~/ros-underlay http://ros.org/rosinstalls/fuerte-ros-full.rosinstall

Then the following:

cd ~/ros-underlay
mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/opt/ros/fuerte -DSETUPTOOLS_DEB_LAYOUT=OFFLS_DEB_LAYOUT=OFF

The last command fails, noting that:

-- Could NOT find Boost
CMake Error at rospack/CMakeLists.txt:31 (message):
Couldn't find Boost
-- Configuring incomplete, errors occurred!

I've checked the CMakeList.txt in rospack, at line 31:

find_package(Boost 1.40.0 COMPONENTS system filesystem program_options)
if(NOT Boost_FOUND)
  message(FATAL_ERROR "Couldn't find Boost")
endif()

I've noticed, that on my system - Fedora 18 x64 - the boost package is version 1.50.0. Replacing the numbers did not help. I've also tried to replace this code by a solution from stackoverflow:

FIND_PACKAGE(Boost)
IF (Boost_FOUND)
    INCLUDE_DIRECTORIES(${Boost_INCLUDE_DIR})
    ADD_DEFINITIONS( "-DHAS_BOOST" )
ENDIF()

None of these worked.

Btw, is a full ROS install from source on Fedora a feasible task?

I've used 12.04 only for ROS, but I like Fedora better. It would be nice to have ROS working on this system.

Hi,

We have a Pioneer P3AT robot with a rather outdated on-board PC - Pentium III 700 MHz with 256 MB RAM. The robot communicates with a powerful PC through Wi-Fi. In our current setup, the on-board PC runs a driver package (RosAria), a node for SICK laser, transformation and robot_state_publisher stuff. The following components run on the external PC: move_base, amcl, map_server, rviz.

This setup does perform pretty well.

We were thinking about an optimization - move every node to the robot's on-board PC except for rviz. This should make information flow more efficient, but the question is that will the robot's hardware handle this task.

Note: the on-board PC runs Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS in text mode.

Hello,

Recently I've found out, that I must give the navigation stack a quaternion describing rotation in addition to the vector3D goal. Quaternions were new to me, so I learnt about them because I would like to use them in ROS. My question is about actual implementation.

Suppose that I would like to go from (0,0,0) to (1,1,0). Then I know, that the robot would probably face to 45°, so...

double inRadian = radian(degree);

tf::Quaternion rotateByThis(tf::Vector3(0,0,1), inRadian); // is this call okay?

goal.target_pose.pose.orientation.w = ? // tf::Quaternion has getW() method, should I use that value?

goal.target_pose.pose.orientation.x = ?

goal.target_pose.pose.orientation.y = ?

goal.target_pose.pose.orientation.z = ?