ros2-teleop

The ROS 2 teleop snap allows for teleoperating a robot from either the keyboard, gamepad or leave it to the navigation stack.

Build

This package is distributed as a snap and as such is meant to be built using snapcraft:

SNAPCRAFT_ENABLE_EXPERIMENTAL_EXTENSIONS=1 snapcraft

Install

Using the locally built snap, first install it

snap install --dangerous ros2-teleop-*.snap

It can also be installed directly from the store:

snap install ros2-teleop

Use

Joystick

The snap offers the possibility to teleoperate the robot from a joystick.

Run the application with:

snap start ros2-teleop.joy

This app launches both the gamepad driver as well as the joy teleop node.

The snap offers parameters for the joystick application. Those are:

• joy-vel (string, default: 'joy_vel')
• joy-dev (string, default: 'dev/input/js0')
• joy-config (string, default: '')
• config-filepath (string, default: '')

At least one between joy-config and config-filepath parameters must be set for the application to run. In case both joy-config and config-filepath are set, the configuration file will take precedence.

The upstream package offers some default joystick configurations. Those can be set up with the joy-config parameter as follows:

snap set joy-config='ps3'

In alternative, a custom configuration file can be used. The file can be provided by means of a URL. In such case, the snap will download the file and place it in $SNAP_COMMON/config/joy_teleop.config.yaml. To configure the config-filepath to a URL:

snap set ros2-teleop config-filepath="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/robot-repo/joy_teleop.config.yaml"

Note: the URL must be reachable by the snap. When using a URL, the configuration file will be downloaded everytime the joy app is launched. Therefore a configuration update upstream will be applied with the application relaunch.

Otherwise to configure the config-filepath to a local configuration file:

snap set ros2-teleop config-filepath="/var/snap/ros2-teleop/common/config/joy_teleop.config.yaml"

The local configuration should be at a path accessible to the snap such as $SNAP_COMMON.

Keyboard

The robot can also be teleoperated from a keyboard (e.g. SSH) by launching the application with,

ros2-teleop.key

Mux

The snap makes use of a topic multiplexer to switch from one source to another. Its input topic can be selected as,

ros2-teleop.mux-select <topic>

This is equivalent to:

ros2 service call /mux/select topic_tools_interfaces/srv/MuxSelect "{topic: <topic>}"

The topics names can also be configured with snap parameters:

• cmd-vel (string, default: "cmd_vel")
• nav-vel (string, default: "nav_vel")
• web-vel (string, defautl: "web_vel")

Note that when launching the joy or key app, the appropriate topic is automatically selected.