Closed-loop control of a robot simulated with Player/Stage

Note:

Reviewed for release 2.10.0.

In this tutorial we will connect a simple controller to a robot simulated using 2-D Player/Stage simulator. The system diagram is shown below (IceGrid Registry and IceStorm are not shown).

In this tutorial we will use components which have external dependencies.

• Player/Stage to simulate the robotic platform. Debian installation instructions for Player can be found in orca_doc_installdebian. This tutorial was tested with Player/Stage version 2.0.4. (note: as of writing the Player Debian package does not properly install its dependencies. If something does not work, write to the Player mailing list or install from source.)

Starting Orca

Start IceGrid Registry and IceStorm server as described in the Quick-Start Guide.

Create a new system directory and copy Orca sample files.

$ mkdir -p ~/sys/tuteteleop; cd ~/sys/tutereactive
$ cp [ORCA-INSTALL]/share/orca/cfg/robot2d.cfg .
$ cp [ORCA-INSTALL]/share/orca/cfg/laser2d.cfg .
$ cp [ORCA-INSTALL]/share/orca/cfg/reactivewalker.cfg .

Starting Player/Stage

Copy Stage sample files.

$ cp -r [STAGE-SRC]/worlds .

Start up the Stage simulator with the simple world.

$ player worlds/simple.cfg

Components

Sensor and actuator components

Follow the instructions from A bigger system with Player/Stage simulator on how to set and run Robot2d and orca_component_laserscanner2d components.

Controller component

We'll use an example component ReactiveWalker. The config file which we've already copied over does not need to be modified. Start the controller component and watch the robot run (crawl) around the simulated world.

$ reactivewalker

What else?

Take a look at the source files for ReactiveWalker.

Check out more Orca Tutorials.