Simple RViz - Robot Programming course project

Description

The objective of this project is to develop a ROS-based program for controlling a mobile robot while providing a basic visualization system similar to RViz. The application displays key elements such as a map obtained from the map server, laser scan data, and the robot's base represented as a circular shape. All components are rendered according to their respective transformations.
The program lets users interact with the robot by setting both the initial and final positions by clicking on the map. The selected positions are displayed with green and orange rectangle markers on the map.

Setting Up the Workspace

The following procedure assumes you have ROS Noetic already installed on your machine. Create a folder of your choice (in my case, it’s /home/<usr>/Desktop/RobotProgramming) and set up the catkin workspace inside it. The workspace consists of the simple_rviz package, which is this GitHub folder, and the srrg folder containing the required packages from srrg catkin workspace.

To create the structure, navigate to the chosen directory (for me RobotProgramming) and run the following code to initialize the ROS workspace:

mkdir -p catkin_ws/src
cd catkin_ws/src
catkin_init_workspace

Installed the necessary selected packages in the srrg folder as following:

# Navigate to the workspace
cd catkin_ws/src

# Create the srrg directory 
mkdir srrg
cd srrg

# List of required SRRG packages
repos=(
    srrg2_config_visualizer
    srrg2_core
    srrg2_laser_slam_2d
    srrg2_navigation_2d
    srrg2_orazio
    srrg2_qgl_viewport
    srrg2_slam_interfaces
    srrg2_solver
    srrg_cmake_modules
    srrg_hbst
)

# Base URL for cloning the repositories
url_base="https://gitlab.com/srrg-software"

# Clone each required repository
for repository in "${repos[@]}"; do
    echo "Cloning $repository..."
    git clone "$url_base/$repository.git"
done

echo "SRRG dependencies have been successfully downloaded."

Then, clone the GitHub repository in the src folder:

cd catkin_ws/src
git clone https://github.com/Nickes10/RobotProgramming.git

For the sake of simplicity, rename the folder executing this command:

mv RobotProgramming simple_rviz

Finally build the ROS workspace and source the ROS environment:

cd ~/catkin_ws/
catkin build

# Set up the ROS environment
source /opt/ros/noetic/setup.bash 
source devel/setup.bash

This setup ensures that the simple_rviz package is placed inside the src folder, while all required srrg packages are organized in a separate folder within the same workspace.

Run the Project

To launch this project, simply run in a terminal the roscore:

roscore

While in another terminal, run the launching file

roslaunch simple_rviz launch_file.launch

Once the project is running, you'll be able to see:

• A map displayed, showing the robot's environment.
• A blue point representing the robot on the map.
• Laser scans visualized as red points on the map.

You can interact with RViz to set the initial pose of the robot. To do this, simply click on the map with the left mouse button to set the robot's starting position. A green point will appear where you clicked to indicate the initial pose. This information will be published to the /initialpose topic.

Additionally, you can set the goal pose by clicking with the right mouse button on the map. An orange point will be placed at the clicked location, and the goal will be published to the /move_base/goal topic.

Example