Learn more about this project at Tech-Multiverse.
Thanks to @joshnewans and his tutorials at Articulated Robots, which is what inspired this repo!
This repo combines what Josh demos in his video about dev containers, with his Build a Mobile Robot with ROS project - without the hardware.
The result is a containerized robot simulation starter template to kick-off further exploration into using URDF to describe robots and learning how to work with ROS2.
After cloning this repo, and following the directions below, you will have:
- Gazebo Simulation with a starter bot spawned and ready for commands.
- RViz robot visualizer representing the state of the robot, and each component, in relation to the "world".
- An example ROS package called "my_bot".
- An example URDF (XML) description of the "box bot" from the project.
- The ability to control your robot with terminal commands:
- i = forward
- , = back
- u = turn left
- o = turn right
- etc...
Here's a screenshot of this project:
Here's a video of everything running!
Follow these steps to get everything up and running:
-
In VS Code, with the Dev Containers extention installed, click the blue button in the lower left and choose "reopen with container".
-
Once the container build finishes, open a terminal and navigate to "dev_ws" folder and build the my_bot packge with
colcon build --symlink-install -
Source the new setup file with
source install/setup.bash -
Launch the project and open the Gazebo simulator with
ros2 launch my_bot launch_sim.launch.py -
Open a new terminal and launch the RVIZ visualizer with
rviz2. -
Open the RVIZ configuration file "/dev_ws/src/my_bot/drive_bot.rviz" to load the bot into the scene.
-
Open a third teminal and start the transform log with
ros2 topic echo /tf -
Open a fourth terminal and lauch the controls with
ros2 run teleop_twist_keyboard teleop_twist_keyboard. -
Use the "u" and "o" keys to have the robot do circles, otherwise it's easy to lose track of it visually.
Josh mentions the need to configure XHOST in his video about dev containers. My original setup used WSL2 with Ubuntu. At that time, I didn't have any issues when I walked through the steps of setting up Foxy and running GUI apps like RVIZ. However, I was tired of WSL taking up so much space. When I deleted that, I was not able to run RVIZ anymore. XHOST is the key!!
Linux usually has XHOST built in, but I blew that away when cleaning my drive. Now, I have to make sure XcXsrv is running locally before running RVIZ.
I've added ENV DISPLAY=host.docker.internal:0.0 to the Dockerfile since it helps connect to XcXsrv once it's running.
I first have to run "C:\Program Files\VcXsrv\xlaunch.exe" with access control disabled for everything to work.
You may need to take a different route, depending on your system.
Hopefully that saves someone from having to fight with that for several hours - like I did! 🙃