AutoRally

Software for the AutoRally research platform.

AutoRally Platform Website

AutoRally Youtube Channel

Research Pages AutoRally is associated with:

• http://rehg.org/autorally
• http://dcsl.gatech.edu/research-muri-nascar.html
• http://acds-lab.gatech.edu/Research.html

Contributing

We welcome bug fixes, ehancements, new features, and feedback!

Please submit pull requests to the devel branch that conform to the ROS C++ Style Guide. We use Gitflow, so master branch is reserved for releases.

Setup Instructions

Contents

1. Install Prerequisites
2. Clone repository
3. Install AutoRally ROS Dependencies
4. Compilation/Running
5. Generate Documentation
6. Test Setup in Simulation

1. Install Prerequisites

1. Install Ubuntu 14.04 64-bit

2. Install required packages

   sudo apt-get install git doxygen openssh-server libusb-dev texinfo

   Recommended Tools

   The following tools are useful, but not necessary for this project.

   • feh
   • cutecom
   • cmake-curses-gui
   • coriander
   • synaptic
   • arduino
   • python-termcolor

3. Install ros-indigo-desktop-full

4. Install gtsam

   Follow the gtsam Quick Start guide to clone and install the develop branch of gtsam.

   Instead of cmake .., use:

   cmake -DGTSAM_INSTALL_GEOGRAPHICLIB=ON -DGTSAM_WITH_EIGEN_MKL=OFF ..

   Once install is complete, make sure linux can see the shared library:

   sudo ldconfig

2. Clone or Fork Repositories

Get the autorally and imu_3dm_gx4 repositories in a catkin workspace. The suggested location is ~/catkin_ws/src/, but any valid catkin worskspace source folder will work. We suggest forking if you will be working with the code.

To clone:

git clone https://github.com/AutoRally/autorally.git
git clone https://github.com/AutoRally/imu_3dm_gx4.git

3. Install AutoRally ROS Dependencies

Within the catkin workspace folder, run this command to install the packages this project depends on.

rosdep install --from-path src --ignore-src -y

4. Compilation & Running

To compile and install run catkin_make from the catkin workspace folder.

Due to the additional requirement of ROS's distributed launch system, you must run

source src/autorally/autorally_util/setupEnvLocal.sh

before using any AutoRally components. See the wiki for more information about how to set this system up for distributed launches on your vehicle platform.

Note: If you are unfamiliar with catkin, please know that you must run source <catkin_ws>/devel/setup.sh before ROS will be able to locate the autorally packages. This line can be added to your ~/.bashrc file.

5. Generate Documentation

You can generate / update code documentation by running doxygen in autorally/.

To view code documentation open autorally/doc/html/index.html in a web browser.

6. Test Setup in Simulation

To test that your setup process was successful, run the AutoRally simulator with the following command. You can use a USB gamepad to drive the simulated platform around. On startup, the runstop message published by the joystick node is false. Press any of the buttons by the right stick (normally labelled X, Y, A, B or square, triangle, X, circle) to toggle the published value.

If you do not have a gamepad and want to control the platform autonomously in simulation, comment out the joystick node launch line in the simulation launch file so that it doesn't publish a runstop message that is always false.

roslaunch autorally_gazebo autoRallyTrackGazeboSim.launch

What's Next

Check out the wiki for:

• Instructions to configure a physical AutoRally platform
• Tutorials for released controllers (waypoint follower, constant speed controller)
• Tutorial to use your own controller with the AutoRally platform
• Information about how to run the included state estimator