create3_examples

Example nodes to drive the iRobot Create 3 Educational Robot.

Setting up the Pi and connecting to the Create 3

To set up the Pi on the Roomba, we mostly followed this official guide, with some slight modifications. For completeness, the following is the entirety of what we did to get the Pi connected to the Roomba:

1. Connect Roomba to Raspberry Pi 4 via USB-C as described in this guide.
2. Follow steps 1-3 in the official guide
3. Follow step 4 in the official guide, including the UWNet wifi in addition to the usb0 connection:

        usb0:
            dhcp4: false
            optional: true
            addresses: [192.168.186.3/24]
        wlan0:
            optional: true
            access-points:
                "UWNet": {}
            dhcp4: true

4. Follow steps 5, 6, and 7 as in the official guide. On the first boot with a Raspberry Pi, you will be prompted to enter a username and password, but the default username and password will not work immediately. Wait a few minutes for the Pi to run some first-time setup, and you'll see some message about tty, at which point you can enter the default username and password (both ubuntu).
5. Reboot the Pi by typing reboot to the console
6. Follow step 8 in the official guide. If you have some trouble with packages installing, read the error message and do as directed, (should be sudo apt get update)
7. Follow step 9 directions for rmw_fastrtps_cpp. No custom configuration is needed for fastrtps, it should work out of the box. Make sure that the RMW for the Create 3 is set to fastrtps as well, as described here.
8. Reboot the Pi: reboot
9. Running ros2 topic list should give a long list of topics provided by the create 3, as described here

Everything below this point comes from the forked create3_examples repository

Dependencies

• ROS 2 Galactic

Build instructions

First, source your ROS 2 workspaces with all the required dependencies. Then, you are ready to clone and build this repository. You should only have to do this once per install.

mkdir -p create3_examples_ws/src
cd create3_examples_ws/src
git clone https://github.com/iRobotEducation/create3_examples.git
cd ..
rosdep install --from-path src --ignore-src -yi
colcon build

Initialization instructions

You will have to do this in every new session in which you wish to use these examples:

source ~/create3_examples_ws/install/local_setup.sh

Run the examples

Refer to the individual examples README.md for instructions on how to run them.

Potential pitfalls

If you are unable to automatically install dependencies with rosdep (perhaps due to this issue), please do be sure to manually install the dependencies for your particular example of interest, contained in its package.xml file.