README.md

Usage

Cloning the correct AMBF branch and building

Clone, build and source AMBF based on these instructions

Launching the simulation

We can use the provided launch file in this repo with the appropriate indices.

cd <path_to_this_folder>
./ambf_simulator --launch_file ADF/launch.yaml -l 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8

You may open the launch.yaml file and inspect its contents to figure out what exactly do the ADF files 0-8 represent.

Connecting a Controller

If you have a game controller, you can use it control the rovers and the attached manipulator in the simulation.

To do so, we first need to spawn the ROS Joy node. Please set it up using these instructions

As per the instructions above, please determine which /dev/input/jsX is your joystick bound to, then open a terminal and type:

rosparam set joy_node/dev "/dev/input/jsX"

replacing X by the number found above.

Then run the joy node as:

rosrun joy joy_node

Starting the Remote Control Script

Navigate to the the scripts folder in this package. With your joy node and simulation running before hand, run the script below:

python multi_rover_control.py

Now you should be able to use your joystick to control the rovers and their attached manipulators. Button 4 is bound to toggle control between the rovers. To change the button and axes mapping, you can tweak the code in multi_rover_control.py.

Controlling the Simulation Programatically

The scripts folder should have good examples for this. Please refer also to the multi_rover_control.py script and modify as necessary.