Validate your Task 3 archive on your local machine

In this tutorial, we show how to confirm (locally) that your Task 3 archive has everything it needs in it to be successful. Before running this tutorial, make sure you've already created your cvchallenge_task3.tgz archive by following the Task 3 archive creation instructions.

Create a temporary workspace

We're going to set up a temporary workspace in your home directory, and set it up for development:

mkdir -p task3_tmp_ws/src
cd task3_tmp_ws/src
catkin_init_workspace

Next, extract your Task 3 archive that you created:

tar xzf ~/cvchallenge_task3.tgz

YMMV, if your file is located somewhere else. You should see your packages now in your src/ directory. We'll need to populate with the catvehicle and obstaclestopper packages from github:

git clone https://github.com/sprinkjm/catvehicle.git
git clone https://github.com/sprinkjm/obstaclestopper.git

This is everything we need!

Build the workspace

cd .. 
catkin_make
source devel/setup.bash

If this succeeds, we're ready to run your world!

roslaunch cvchallenge_task3 catvehicle_custom.launch worldfile:=world5.world

Choose a different world if you like (you can change the world you use when you run in the CPS-VO simulator). After Gazebo comes up, time to run your task3.launch file (in a new tab):

cd task3_tmp_ws/
source devel/setup.bash
roslaunch cvchallenge_task3 task3.launch

If you don't have a task3.launch file, make sure you've completed the Create a launch file for Task 3 tutorial.

If you rostopic echo /detections, stuff should be flying past. If not, fire up rviz to see whether the sensors you are using can see anything. This is important: if it's not doing interesting stuff on your machine, the odds that it is doing interesting stuff on the CPS-VO cloud simulator are fairly low. 

Your car should stop, at some point! If it doesn't, you will want to make it stop by adding another controller or some additional logic (see Stop the vehicle if it gets too far away and related tutorials). If your car doesn't stop on its own, then the validation on the CPS-VO will be impossible to perform.

To monitor whether or not your car stops, try (in a new tab):

source devel/setup.bash
rosrun rviz rviz

After the car stops, you should see a gazebo_output.world file created in your ~/.ros directory.

Stop all the simulations

You will now want to ^C the launch files above, and wait for them to finish: this is especially true for the gazebo tab. Once that's done, you are ready to visualize the launch file you created:

rosrun gazebo_ros gazebo ~/.ros/gazebo_output.world

When this starts up,  you should see an approximation of the world you just drove in.

What's next?

If you are feeling good, it's time to Simulate your archive using the tutorial here