TORTUE

TORTUE is an effort to marry a motion sensor with a Roomba base. It was inspired from Turtlebot, Billibot and Oculus. For the base we used Roomba 560 and for the motion sensor we used ASUS Xtion Pro Live. The software platform is ROS Electric. The project is still in its early days and more is being planned for the future.

Fig.1. Concept development for Tortue

Fig.2. First run on 2nd March 2013, Saturday

The video shows a very basic obstacle avoidance behaviour using point cloud.

Fig.3. rxgraph for basic obstacle avoidance

The Tortue team comprises of ,

The project has a home page at github, http://arkapravo.github.io/tortue/. Tortue means Turtle in the French language, which reflects the use of ROS for the robot, ROS has a long term Turtle association and all of their release have a Turtle reference, also ROS softwares (viz. turtlesim) and robots (viz. turtlebot) have such naming. There has been suggestions that tortue has a likeness to wall-e, we do not deny it ! :-)

WALLE@ROS

WALLE@ROS

An interesting recreation in player/stage is walle, which was designed by Richard. I have made a ROS package of the same. The package can be downloaded here, http://mobotica.googlecode.com/files/walle_ros.tar.gz . The simulation may be run with the following command;

rosrun stage stageros `rospack find walle_ros`/world/simple.world 

This stage window should pop-up,
 

The simulation script employs the stage wander controller, and the simulation starts off in the 'PAUSED' mode, left click on the stage window and press P to get things moving. Walle will wander around.

To have a closer look at walle, left click on the stage window and press R (Perspective camera). 
 

NOTE

1. Tested on ROS diamondback, should work on ROS electric
2. Any issues with the ROS package, please write to me at arkapravobhaumik at gmail dot com

EVA

EVA@PLAYER/STAGE 

After some effort, I was able to put together an inc file in Player/Stage which resembled eva, walle's love interest.

WALL-E & EVA - 2.0

WALL-E & EVA - 2.0 

If robots could have romantic mushy chit-chat, how would it be ? The idea is given a comical angle with a python script utilising the random module and the time module.

A script which gives output as the following, 

and on other times as,

.... still other occasions,

Guess romance has its own odds !

Many thanks Luke, this mushy program works nice ! 

The Python script is available here.

WALL-E LOOKS FOR EVA

SPEECH IN PLAYER-STAGE 

We had met WALL-E@PLAYER-STAGE earlier this month. Now, WALL-E looks for EVA as he roams around.

Using the speech.cc file found in player installation files at player-3.0.0/examples/libplayerc++/speech.cc, modifying that file so slightly !

Using this script while WALL-E is set to 'wander' (Stage Controller) creates a fair animation, nicely combining the 2 behaviours; wandering and speech.

Lets hope WALL-E meets EVA soon ! :)

WALL-E

WALL-E@PLAYER-STAGE

While going through the stage installations files, I found a walle include file at Stage-3.2.0-Source/worlds/walle.inc.

Marrying walle.inc file with the 'usual' simple.world, simple.cfg and sick.inc files I got wall-e to move around in the 'caves' environment !

Somehow this appealed to the child in me ! :) 


The following video is by talk2aswin;