Steer Bot

Simulate a simple Ackermann steering vehicle in Gazebo using ros_control the ackermann_steering_controller and steer_bot_hardware_gazebo.

This was tested by the ZED team at UniMe on a Ubuntu 20.04 with ROS Noetic (installed with the one line installer).

Installation

# Create a workspace folder in your home directory
mkdir -p ~/catkin_ws/src

# Clone the repo
cd ~/catkin_ws/src
git clone https://github.com/ZancleEDrive/steer_bot

# Checkout a version of `steer_drive_ros` patched for ROS Melodic (but it also works for Noetic)
git clone https://github.com/ZancleEDrive/steer_drive_ros.git
cd steer_drive_ros
git checkout melodic-devel

#Install rosdep if not present
sudo apt install python3-rosdep

# Check dependencies
cd ~/catkin_ws
rosdep check --from-paths src --ignore-src --rosdistro noetic

# Install dependencies
rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src --rosdistro noetic -y

#Install Hector SLAM dependency (to be inserted in rosdep)
sudo apt install ros-noetic-hector-slam

# Build
cd ~/catkin_ws
catkin_make

# Make sure your source the setup.bash file at any login
echo "source ~/catkin_ws/devel/setup.bash" >> ~/.bashrc

Run

Start the Gazebo simulation:

roslaunch steer_bot_gazebo steer_bot_sim.launch

Start rviz:

roslaunch steer_bot_viz view_steer_bot_robot.launch

If all is working well you should see the robot in Gazebo and be able to command it using rqt_robot_steering:

The robot model and odometry can be monitored in rviz:

License

This software is licensed under the BSD-3-Clause license found in the LICENSE file in the root directory of this source tree.