Terry & ROS

After a number of adventures I finally got a ROS stack setup so that move_base, amcl, and my robot base all like each other well enough for navigation to function. Luckily I added some structural support to the physical base as the self driving control is a little snappier than I normally tend to drive the robot by hand.

There was an upgrade from Indigo to Kinetic in the mix and the coupled update to Ubuntu Xenial to match the ROS platform update. I found a bunch of ROS packages that I used are not currently available for Kinetic, so had an expanding catkin ws for self compiled system packages to complete the update. Really cool stuff like rosserial wasn't available. Then I found that a timeout there caused a bunch of error messages about mismatched read sizes. I downgrade to the indigo version of rosserial and the error was still there, so I assume it relates to the various serial drivers in the Linux kernel doing different timing than they did before. Still, one would have hoped that rosserial was more resilient to multiple partial packet delivery. But with a timeout bump all works again. FWIW I've seen similar in boost, you try to read 60 bytes and get 43 then need to get that remaining 17 and stuff the excess in a readback buffer for the next packet read attempt. The boost one hit me going from 6 to 10 channel io to a rc receiver-to-uart arduino I created. The "joy" of low level io.

I found that the issues stopping navigation from working for me out of the box on Indigo were still there in Kinetic.  So I now have a very cool bit of knowledge to tell if somebody has navigation working or is just assuming that what one reads equals what will work out of the box.

Probably the next ROS thing will be trying to get a moveit stack for the mearm. I've got one of these cut and so will soon have it built. It seems like an ideal thing to work on MoveIt for because its a simple low cost arm that anybody can cut out and servo up. I've long wanted a simple tutorial on MoveIt for affordable arms. It might be that I'm the one writing that tutorial rather than just reading it.

Video and other goodness to follow. As usual, persistence it the key^TM.