Core modules for the SMADS robot-side delivery pipeline
This library strives to minimize external dependencies, while providing a basic interface for other platforms to implement over.
Therefore, it is recommended that any implementation for a given platform be done outside of this library and repository.
In the root of your catkin workspace, fetch the package dependencies:
$ rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src --rosdistro=melodic
now, simply invoke catkin tools:
$ catkin build smads_core
The SMADS architecture is flexible on the data it receives and sends on a particular robot platform. However, it offers standard input and output topics for communication to standard apps. Here, we go into these details.
This is data output from the platform and homogenized into the standard message types below.
Topic: /smads/localization/out/gps
Message Type: geometry_msgs/PointStamped
Topic: /smads/navigation/out/status
Message Type: actionlib_msgs/GoalStatus
Topic: /smads/navigation/out/planned_path
Message Type: nav_msgs/Path
This is data or commands you want to send to the platform. The architecture takes the data from these standard message types below and decomposes them into messages that are acceptable to the platform.
Topic: /smads/navigation/in/cmd
Message Type: geometry_msgs/Pose2D
As alluded to above, the architecture is platform independent and can be reconfigured to work with new platforms easily. How to configure the architecture is nominally handled through rosparameters, which are detailed here.
This parameter should be a string that specifies the topic that your platform publishes localization location estimates. The message type is handled by the archietecture.
This parameter should be a string that specifies the name of the map that the archiecture should use to convert location estimates from the map frame to GPS coordinates. E.g. UT_Campus
This parameter should be a string that specifies the directory that the map specified above lives. This should generally be the local path of a package that has the map files.
This parameter should be a string that specifies the topic that your robot platform listens for and responds to navigation goals. E.g. /move_base_simple/goal
This parameter should be a string that specifies the name of the message that your robot platform listens for on the topic detailed above. E.g. PoseStamped
This parameter should be a string that specifies the name of the package the message type detailed above belongs to. E.g. geometry_msgs
This parameter should be a string that specifies the topic that navigation goal status is published on. At a minimum, this topic should convey that the robot is in one of these states: (pending, active / executing goal, goal success, goal failure)
This parameter should be a string that specifies the topic on which the navigation publishes its global plan to its target goal.
This library implements an abstract class in robot_client.py that allows a developer to implement standardized methods that the architecture will call.
For some of these methods, the data returned is communicated over ROS for core functions such as Navigation or Localization that expect ROS communication.