If you do not have Linux or do not want to pollute your Linux distro with extra packages, you can use the ready-to-deply OVA file located here. Username is manos
and password is robot2016
.
Remember that the code will operate correctly but much slower that a real Linux installation.
Note: If the OVA file throws an error when imported deactivate the USB devices from the virtual machine manager.
This series of challenges require the utilization of the STDR Simulator which is a collection of ROS packages. The operating system required is Ubuntu 14.04.
ROS is a "flexible framework for writing robot software. It is a collection of tools, libraries, and conventions that aim to simplify the task of creating complex and robust robot behavior across a wide variety of robotic platforms."
STDR Simulator is a two dimentional robot simulator that enables simple simulation of robots in an intuitive and easy way. It is based on ROS and its main goal is to enable you to setup a simulation environment in just a few minutes.
###ROS installation
First of all you must install ROS. The flavour is ROS Indigo if you have Ubuntu 14.04 installed. The installation instructions can be found here:
###Download the required packages
Note for Ubuntu 16.04: Before you start, make sure that pip (python) is installed and its version is greater than 9.01. You can install or update to the latest version with the following commands:
curl https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py -o get-pip.py
python get-pip.py
The required packages you have to download are STDR Simulator and the current repository. Before them install the following libraries:
sudo apt-get install git mercurial ros-indigo-map-server python-pip libffi-dev
(NOTE for Ubuntu 16.04 / ROS Kinetic users replace "ros-indigo-map-server" with "ros-kinetic-map-server")
sudo apt-get install gfortran libopenblas-dev liblapack-dev
sudo pip install cython
sudo pip install cffi scikit-image
sudo easy_install scipy
For Ubuntu 16.04 / ROS Kinetic users, you must also install:
sudo apt-get install qt4-dev-tools qt4-qmake qt4-designer
Create a catkin repository in a folder you want (in this tutorial we create in in $HOME):
cd ~
mkdir -p catkin_ws/src
cd catkin_ws/src
catkin_init_workspace
Next, clone the STDR Simulator:
cd ~/catkin_ws/src/
git clone https://github.com/stdr-simulator-ros-pkg/stdr_simulator.git
cd stdr_simulator
git checkout autonomous_systems
For Ubuntu 16.04 / ROS Kinetic users, you must erase the following line.
Next, clone the Intelligent Robotic System's repository:
cd ~/catkin_ws/src/
git clone https://github.com/etsardou/intelligent_robot_systems_2016.git
Build the packages:
cd ~/catkin_ws
catkin_make -j1
cd ~/catkin_ws/src/intelligent_robot_systems_2016/art_autonomous_exploration/src
make
If the build was successful you are ok!