RoboCup 2019
In 2019 researchers of the major RoboCup Rescue Simulation League will a workshop at the RoboCup in Sydney, Australia. The preparations of this workshop are collected on the repository of the the Joint-Rescue-Forces.
The material of the workshop was created during the working week in Cambridge, thanks to collaboration support of the RoboCup Federation. Installation instructions for the needed software can be found at the wiki. The minutes of this working week can be found in the CoSpace branch of the code. Background material and links can be found at a separate page. The schedule of the week is for the moment:
Wednesday March 20 - Preparing the infrastructure
- Junior Robots to the Rescue - presentation Arnoud Visser
- Demo CoSpace - presentation Josie Hughes
- Demo Scratch 3.0 ROS - presentation Masaru Shimizu
Thursday day March 21 - Building an interface
- Approaches to build the bridge from Cospace robot to Virtual Rescue robot competition - presentation Fatemeh Pahlevan Aghababa, Amirreza Kabiri
- Overview of Cospace challenges - presentation Fatemeh Pahlevan Aghababa, Amirreza Kabiri
Friday March 22 - Testing an interface
- Discussion over the role of the simulation platform- presentation & Discussion Josie, Arnoud, Masaru
- Demo of Webots example world & challenge
- Demo of Gazebo-ROS version example world & challenge:mp4
Saturday March 23 - Building the workshop
- Provisional Road Map from Junior to Major
- Webots introduction & resources - Webots introduction started
- Progress of Gazebo-ROS version example world & challenge:png mp4
Sunday March 24 - Creating the tutorials
- Demo Webots competition field & game control (unfortunately the video is missing the score board!)
- Matlab Live Script to control remotely a Kephera robot started in Webots, as described in the Webots tutorial.
Monday March 25 - Wrapping up
Tuesday March 26 - Planning
After the workshop
Tuesday April 9 - Controlling an ePuck2
- The wifi version of the epuck2-monitor is no longer available at www.e-puck.org, so I made a new version, based on Qt5.7.
- You could download epuck2-wifi-monitor.zip.
- Unpack it in a folder on your Windows10 machine (64bits).
- Start the monitor with the script
run-epuck2-wifi-monitor.bat. - This monitor should work together with the e-puck2_server sample running on Webots (or on a real epuck2). To be tested.
Tursday April 11 - Controlling an ePuck2
- Tested the monitor. Could control the robot and read out the sensor values, except the camera images!
Tursday April 11 - Add Scoring Board in CoSpace Gazebo-ROS version
- Added the scoring boards and item indicators.Item indicators looked from the ROBOT2 camera , Displayed Scores
June & July 2019 - Development of V-REP
- V-REP was considered as another platform that could pass the requirements. The pros and cons were investigated and finally, it was qualified to be the third platform developed by the team.
- e-puck and pioneer3at robot models were implemented and modified due to the needs defined before.
- Robot's camera and sensors were modified to be readable.
- First competition Fields were implemented in V-REP in which victims are modeled as the blue and red balls and the ball deposit area had the shape of a gazebo, and moveable and unmoveable boxes were modeled as obstacles.
- The platform architecture could be found on here which shows the structure of Python-based API and ROS-application.
- A simple code was generated to control the robots in V-REP by using Python-API.
- Demo of V-REP example word and challenge.
- A more complex sample code which shows how the teams can create the world map could be found in here.
- V-REP-simplus GitHub could be found in here
December 2019 - The release of the alpha version of V-REP platform
The SimPlus_VRep repository is dedicated to the new Rescue simulation environment for Robocupers from Juniors to Majors and is aimed to be a bridge from Robocup Junior Rescue to Robocup Major Rescue competitions so that a kid could start with it (e.g. by using Scratch to move a simulated robot) and gradually be introduced with more complex problems and languages (e.g. implementing object detection and SLAM in ROS).
In order to have a better understanding of how the installation and running are performed, we have provided a demo. Please have a look at the following video: https://youtu.be/zule-A18Qzo
It shows the installation process and runs a sample of robot controlling code in order to show the robot interaction with the environment.
Conclusion
Our approach is summarized with a poster:
Workshop photo:
