robotTools

What is it?

Robot Tools is a group of utilities packed into an auto-launching ecosystem. It is designed to be a framework that you can add your own programs and scripts to in order to streamline bringing up your robot.

What does it do?

The default system is an auto-launching screen session that launches four tabs.

• BASH: empty shell to use
• ROS: roscore
• HTOP: htop
• CPU: log CPU usage at 1Hz to the data folder

Users can add whatever additional processes they want (ex. sensor drivers, image processing, path planning...)

The default system also launches two cron jobs

• data_folder: creates a new folder for robot data every X minutes
• delete_data: deletes oldest data in the data folder when disk space exceeds XX%

Installation

To install it on your own system, run the script build_and_install.sh To install it on a robot...

• pack_deb.sh
• scp robot-tools.deb install_deb.sh your_robot@<robot_ip_address>:/tmp/
• (On robot) cd /tmp/
• (On robot) ./install_deb.sh

Using the custom screen session

• To attach to the screen: screen -x robot
• Once inside the screen, navigate with: Ctrl+(left,right) arrow
• To exit the screen, Ctrl+\ then press 'd'
• Standard gnuscreen commands are the same, but the escape key is remapped to \

Configuration

• Explore the opt/robot/config folder
• You can change robot environment variables in robot.config
• You can also add/remove/change screen tabs in gnuscreeen-robot
• If you really want, you can modify the screen behavior in gnuscreen-base