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Submitted by sprinkle on Mon, 05/30/2016 - 11:53am

Using CAT Vehicle Testbed with ROS Melodic

The current version, 3.0.1, uses ROS Melodic on Ubuntu 18.04. Most of the tutorials written for the version 2.0.2 are applicable for version 3.0.1 unless stated otherwise. In order to make the testbed compatible with the ROS Melodic, we have compiled a few packages from the source. Detailed instruction on how to use the version 3.0.1 is available on GitHub README page.

Please post to the forum if you have any questions.

Using CAT Vehicle Testbed with ROS Indigo

Release 2.0.2 or older use ROS Indigo, so you should install Ubuntu 14.04 and follow the tutorials found on the ROS installation page. When installing Ubuntu, note that:

  • We only support ROS Indigo on Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty Tahr) on VMWare (or bare metal). 

    • We have had trouble with network connectivity using Virtual Box
    • ROS Kinetic and Jade will have compile failures with our software
    • Newer versions of Ubuntu may not run ROS Indigo from apt binaries
  • you should ensure you are using 14.04 (Trusty Tahr) and not a newer version 
  • we recommend 80GB of storage (permits you to also install MATLAB/Simulink and store large log files)

The ROS installation page is at http://wiki.ros.org/indigo/Installation/Ubuntu 

Additional ROS package installation

After installing ROS, we require the additional packages to be installed:

Controller manager (allows the car to move around with ROS messages)

sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-controller-manager
sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-ros-control ros-indigo-ros-controllers
sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-gazebo-ros-control

Velodyne

sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-velodyne

SICK Laser

sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-sicktoolbox ros-indigo-sicktoolbox-wrapper

Joystick control

sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-joystick-drivers

Localization packages

These enable SLAM-based localization.

sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-hector-slam ros-indigo-hector-mapping

Hardware installation

NovAtel GPS

Unless you plan on decode GPS data on your laptop directly from the hardware, this package is optional.

sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-novatel-span-driver

Downloading the release

Head over to the Compile the release tutorial to get it downloaded and build, and ready to run!

Backlinks: