Usage

Cloning the correct AMBF branch and building

To run the galen robot simulation, first clone the right branch of ambf.

cd ambf
git checkout origin/ambf-1.0
git checkout -b ambf-1.0
git pull origin ambf-1.0

Make a build directory if it is not already there

mkdir build

Then build the simulator

cd build
cmake ..
make -j8

Make sure to source it so ROS can find the packages. You can do it either per terminal or in your .bashrc

source devel/setup.bash

Running the Models

We can run the simulation files using the custom launch file and loading the desired ADF files file by providing their indexes.

./ambf_simulator --launch_file <path_to_this_shared_folder>/ADF/launch.yaml -l 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8

You may open the launch.yaml file and inspect its contents to figure out what exactly do the ADF files 0-8 represent.

Connecting a Controller

If you have a game controller, you can use it control the rovers and the attached manipulator in the simulation.

We must now run the ROS node so that it spawns the JoyStick driver and streams its state data. You can find the details here: http://wiki.ros.org/joy/Tutorials/ConfiguringALinuxJoystick

To sum things up. Make sure that you have the ROS joy package installed and that your Joystick is connected to the computer via USB/Ethernet/Bluetooth etc.

Use the link above to figure out which /dev/input/jsX is your joystick bound to, then open a terminal and type:

rosparam set joy_node/dev "/dev/input/jsX"

replacing X by the number found above.

Then run the joy node as:

rosrun joy joy_node

Starting the Remote Control Script

Head over to the scripts folder in this package. With your joy node and simulation running before hand, you can run the script:

python multi_rover_control.py

Now you should be able to use your joystick to control the rovers and their attached manipulators. Button 4 is bound to toggle control between the rovers. To change the button and axes mapping, you can tweak the code in multi_rover_control.py