Creating a Gribot workspace

Gribot software is based on ROS, and all software project files are hosted on github. It is rather easy to create a ROS and Gribot workspace: you can find everything on the web. However, to simplify the live of readers, we are enumerating all the steps in the sections below.

Installing ROS packages

We do uses ROS Lunar under Ubuntu 16.04 and not the latest version, because not all packages have been migrated to Melodic at the time we are writing these lines. However, the goal is to go for the newest ROS version when it is possible.

We suppose that you have a working Ubuntu 16.04 system. The first step is to install ROS: beside the fact that installation details are here, we added the steps below:

Setup sources.lists

This just consists in adding the ROS repository into apt sources.list.

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://packages.ros.org/ros/ubuntu $(lsb_release -sc) main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ros-latest.list'

Setup the key

Installing the key will prevent error message or ROS repository locking.

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://ha.pool.sks-keyservers.net:80 --recv-key 421C365BD9FF1F717815A3895523BAEEB01FA116

Installing packages

To install the packages, just type the following commands:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install ros-lunar-desktop-full

Some packages are not installed by default: therefore you have to add them manually:

sudo apt-get install ros-lunar-canopen-motor-node ros-lunar-canopen-master ros-lunar-canopen-402 ros-lunar-canopen-chain-node

Initialize rosdep

sudo rosdep init
rosdep update

Environment setup

This make sure the ROS environment is automatically configures each time you open s shell command.

echo "source /opt/ros/lunar/setup.bash" >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

Installing Gribot environment

Now that ROS is installed, we need to install Gribot environment.

Create a catkin environment

Catkin environment is used to host ROS and Gribot is a package.

mkdir -p ~/catkin_ws/src
cd ~/catkin_ws/src
catkin_init_workspace
source devel/setup.bash

You can add the last line, devel/detup.bash, at the end of your .bashrc file, with the path related to your own environment.

Installing Gribot package

The Gribot package is hosted on github.

cd ~/catkin_ws/src
git clone https://github.com/guycorbaz/gribot.git

When the git repository is completely downloaded, you can buil the package.

cd ~/catkin_wx
catkin_make

Now that the package has been build, you can start ROS. However, make sure you have SocketCAN installed (see here)

roslaunch gribot gribot.launch

You should now see the rviz and gazebo windows that allows you to play with Gribot.