Getting started

Our robots, AMIGO and SERGIO and HERO run using ROS. We run ROS on top of Ubuntu Linux.

Get get started, you can either install our software but that can be a hassle even though we try to make it as easy as we can. If you can get a hold of a computer running our software already, please first see Make HERO do stuff! and Developing HERO for tips on how to manage your files.

Get up to speed

If you are a TU/e student, chances are you spent a lot of time with Matlab on Windows. To get to the point where you can contribute to improving our robots, there are a few things to learn from there:

1. Linux, also on the command line. Navigating the file system, executing programs etc, checking network configs etc.
2. ROS: Follow a few ROS tutorials so you know how a ROS node works, roughly how to set one up and to debug one. Figure out what Actions are in ROS, how to call a service etc.
3. Git, the version control system. We use this extensively to keep track of changes etc. Know how to commit your changes in easily understood chunks and propose a Pull Request with them.
4. Python is the programming language used from most of our higher-level decision making software. Know what objects, classes, methods etc are, how to iterate over a collection.
5. tue-env, which is a collection of linux commandline aliases etc to make working with our software a bit easier.

Install our software

1. To get started, install your laptop with Ubuntu 20.04 64-bit. If you do not have a dedicated laptop for Ubuntu you can create a dual boot and install ubuntu alongside windows.

Note: Make sure you allocate at least 100GB for Ubuntu

2. Update your Ubuntu using

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

3. You should let github know of your laptop by adding an ssh key to your account. For this:

ssh-keygen  # Follow the prompts. It should create a public and a private key

By default, public key is saved in ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub and private key in ~/.ssh/id_rsa

cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub  # Get contents of public key

Now open settings in your GitHub account and add an ssh key. In the key value you can paste the whole output of the previous command

4. It's time to install our software. For that follow the bootstrap instructions for ROS1 on tue-env and install the target hero-dev as follows:

tue-get install hero-dev
source ~/.bashrc

This script installs everything you need, from various tools like git and terminator to most of our ROS packages.

Update and build:

tue-get update
tue-make

Make the robot do stuff!

Continue to Make HERO do stuff!.