Mission template software

Revision as of 18:22, 12 March 2019

ROBOBOT mission demo C++

This is an example software in C++ to access both raspberry camera and REGBOT, and with an example mission controlled from the raspberry.

Get software

Get the ROBOBOT software from the svn repository:

svn checkout svn://repos.gbar.dtu.dk/jcan/regbot/mission mission

or just update if there already

svn up

Compile

To be able to compile the demo software CMAKE needs also to use the user installed library (raspicam installed above), so add the following line to ~/.bashrc:

export CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=/usr/local/lib

Then build Makefiles and compile:

cd ~/mission
mkdir -p build
cd build
cmake ..
make

Then test-run the application:

./mission

It should print that the camera is open and connected to the robot (bidge).

Software structure

The software is structures as shown in figure 1 below.

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Figure 1. The example mission software intended as basis for full mission control. In the main.cpp file, three objects are created: bridge (UBridge reg(127.0.0.1)), camera (UCamera cam()) and mission (UMission mission(&reg, &cam)). The bridge handles communication and stores all data from the robot and the gamepad. The camera can capture images and image processing is intended here. The mission object is intended for splitting long missions into mission snippets that the REGBOT can execute.

The mission class has access to robot data and the camera at all times using the pointers "bot->" and "cam->". e.g. the heading (relative to the start position) and if the yellow gamepad button is pressed, can be fetched as:

float heading = bot->pose->h;
bool yellowButton = bot->joy->button[3];

Details about the data code may be found in the upose.cpp, uinfo.cpp, ujoy.cpp, umotor.cpp ... files.

The sound system can be used for debugging, e.g. add a C++ line like:

system("espeak \"bettina reached point 3\" -ven+f4 -a30 -s130");

This line makes the robot say "bettina reached point 3" the parameters "-a30" turns amplitude down to 30%, "-ven+f4" sets language to english with female voice 4 and "-s130" makes the speech a little slower and easier to understand. It requires that espeak is installed (sudo apt install espeak).

To use on Raspberry pi, it is better to use

system("espeak \"Mission paused.\" -ven+f4 -s130 -a60 2>/dev/null &");

The "2>/dev/null" tell that error messages should be dumped, and the final "&" say that it should run in the background (not to pause the mission).

Software documentation (doxygen)

Figure: generated with doxygen http://aut.elektro.dtu.dk/robobot/doc/html/classes.html

The classes that inherit from UData are classes that makes data available for the mission, e.g. joystick buttons (in UJoy) event flags (in UEvent) or IR distance data (in UIRdist).

The classes that inherit from URun has a thread running to receive data from an external source, e.g. UBridge that handles communication with the ROBOBOT_BRIDGE.

The camera class (UCamera) is intended to do the image processing.

HTML documentation - Doxygen

To generate doxygen html files go to mission directory and run doxygen.

cd ~/mission
doxygen Doxyfile

then open the index.html with a browser.

If doxygen is not installed, then install using

sudo apt install doxygen