The last two weeks we have been working on implementing our hardware in ROS. We also started building our first SIMA and simulating our bot in Gazebo. We coded a hardware translation package to convert the data from the Arduinos to ROS and vice versa. We get ticks from the encoder, which we convert to position and speed. We publish this data in the nav_msgs/Odometry message to use it in ROS. On the other hand, we get velocity data from ROS in the cmd_vel topic. We convert this velocity data into a pwm signal for our motor. Due to a missing coordinate system we can only turn the bot with ROS at the moment. We also started to build our first SIMA, which drives almost straight. At the moment we are trying to solve the problem by eliminating the tolerance in the gearbox. We are looking forward to setting up Navstack, which will give us a coordinate system to make the bot go to certain points.
(author: Christoph)