Go-Chase-It

A part Udacity Nanodegree Program

Introduction

A Wheeled robot that scans for a white ball in its environment and move navigates the target.

Description

We have two ROS packages: the drive_bot and the ball_chaser. Here are the steps to design the robot, house it inside your world, and program it to chase white-colored balls:

my_robot:

my_robot ROS package holds our robot model, the white ball, and the gazebo world file.

Robot model

• 4 Wheeled mobile robot with Differential drive.
• A lidar sensor - Hokuyo.
• A camera.

ball_chaser:

ball_chaser ROS package holds our C++ nodes.

• drive_botC++
  • This node provide a ball_chaser/command_robot service to drive the robot by controlling its linear x and angular z velocities. The service should publish to the wheel joints and return back the requested velocities.
• process_imageC++
  • This node reads our robot’s camera image, analyzes it to determine the presence and position of a white ball. If a white ball exists in the image, the node should request a service via a client to drive the robot towards it.

Basic Build Instructions

1. Create a catkin Workspace

    mkdir -p catkin_ws/src
    cd catkin_ws/src
    catkin_init_workspace
    cd ..
    catkin_make

2. Clone the repository

    cd catkin/src
    git clone https://github.com/Gopsee/Go-Chase-It.git
    cd ..
    catkin_make

3. Source the workspace

    source devel/setup.bash

4. Launch the main file

    roslaunch my_robot world.launch 
    roslaunch ball_chaser ball_chaser.launch