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ROS Software Packages

After having verified that the hardware requirements for the Navigation Stack are met, an overview of Remo's software follows.

Software requirements for the ROS Navigation Stack

The diffbot and remo_description repositories contain the following ROS packages:

  • diffbot_base: This package contains the platform-specific code for the base controller component required by the ROS Navigation Stack. It consists of the firmware based on rosserial for the Teensy MCU and the C++ node running on the SBC that instantiates the ROS Control hardware interface including the controller_manager control loop for the real robot. The low-level base_controller component reads the encoder ticks from the hardware, calculates angular joint positions and velocities, and publishes them to the ROS Control hardware interface. Using this interface makes it possible to use the diff_drive_controller package from ROS Control. It provides a controller (DiffDriveController) for a differential drive mobile base that computes target joint velocities from commands received by either a teleop node or the ROS Navigation Stack. The computed target joint velocities are forwarded to the low-level base controller, where they are compared to the measured velocities to compute suitable motor PWM signals using two separate PID controllers, one for each motor.
  • diffbot_bringup: Launch files to bring up the hardware driver nodes (camera, lidar, microcontroller, and so on) as well as the C++ nodes from the diffbot_base package for the real robot.
  • diffbot_control: Configurations for DiffDriveController and JointStateController of ROS Control used in the Gazebo simulation and the real robot. The parameter configurations are loaded onto the parameter server with the help of the launch files inside this package.
  • remo_description: This package contains the URDF description of Remo including its sensors. It allows you to pass arguments to visualize different camera and SBC types. It also defines the gazebo_ros_control plugin. Remo's description is based on the description at https://github.com/ros-mobile-robots/mobile_robot_description, which provides a modular URDF structure that makes it easier to model your own differential drive robot.
  • diffbot_gazebo: Simulation-specific launch and configuration files for Remo and Diffbot, to be used in the Gazebo simulator.
  • diffbot_msgs: Message definitions specific to Remo/Diffbot, for example, the message for encoder data is defined in this package.
  • diffbot_navigation: This package contains all the required configuration and launch files for the ROS Navigation Stack to work.
  • diffbot_slam: Configurations for simultaneous localization and mapping using implementations such as gmapping to create a map of the environment.

After this overview of the ROS packages of a differential robot that fulfill the requirements of the Navigation Stack, the next pages explain those packages in more detail.