Riptide Software

The Riptide AUV Software Platform

This repository is the main codebase for the Underwater Robotics Team at The Ohio State University. Our mission is to develop the software which powers our autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) that compete in the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) RoboSub Competition in San Diego, CA. The software in this repository is built on Robot Operating System and handles low level controls, computer vision, mission-specific programs, and everything in between.

Supported Operating Systems: Ubuntu 16.04

The Underwater Robotics Team
The Ohio State University

Website | License

Initial Setup

Cloning riptide_software

To collaborate with the riptide_software platform, you must fork this repo (click "Fork" at the top-right of this page). When executing the commands below, you will need to enter the URL to your forked repo. From YOUR forked repo, click "Clone or download" at the top-right of the page, copy the URL, and then insert that URL in place of <your_forked_repo>. Do NOT forget the src at the end of the last line. This is a catkin-specific requirement that all source code be placed within a folder called src

NOTE: It is common to see brackets such as <> to act as placeholders for actual code. Make sure you replace the ENTIRE phrase <your_forked_repo> with the URL.

mkdir -p ~/osu-uwrt/riptide_software/
cd ~/osu-uwrt/
git clone <your_forked_repo> repos

Setting up Git Remotes

Since you just cloned your fork to your computer, your remote called origin will point to your fork. Now, create a new remote called upstream that points to this main repo.

cd ~/osu-uwrt/repos
git remote add upstream https://github.com/osu-uwrt/riptide_software.git

Now, if you type:

git remote -v

You will see both a remote to your fork and to the main repo. You will use these two remotes a lot when pushing code to your fork, submitting pull-requests, and pulling the latest code.

Installing ROS and/or Dependencies

The riptide_software base currently uses ROS Kinetic Kame and is dependent on various ROS packages and other libraries. In an effort to stop dependency issues, we have moved to docker for workspace management. Use the docker docs to install docker-ce to prep for the environment. After you have docker installed, all you need to do is run:

./setup

Docker

Docker is a very important component of our development environment. Some of you may have noticed that when setting up this environment, all of the repositories needed were cloned onto your local machine. The docker is used only to store all of the dependencies. This allows for the vscode scripts to work with the physical robot and for us to be able to use RQT_GUI with the robot.

Sourcing

There are a number of environment variables (mostly pertaining to ROS features and package paths) that are required when compiling/running our code. Each time you want to run one of those commands in a terminal, those environment variables will need to be set. This process is called "sourcing", and it is specific to working with catkin workspaces.

To automate this process, we add various commands to the bashrc file indicating what needs to be sourced. As a note, bashrc = Born Again Shell Run-Commands. Each time a new terminal/shell is opened, it executes any commands within this file.

To edit/open the bashrc file, use the terminal text editor, nano (this is a hidden file, hence the "."):

nano ~/.bashrc

To exit and save your changes, press CTRL-X, type "y", then press ENTER. For the changes to take effect, close and re-open all terminals. If you are lazy and don't want to close your terminals, then you will need to source the bashrc file in each terminal that you have open:

source ~/.bashrc

Working with Our Other Repositories

UWRT has a few other repositories that can be used in conjunction with this one. 1. sim_software 2. shared_software

Chaining Workspaces

Each of the above repositories (sim_softare, shared_software) are built on catkin as well. For the entire set of repositories to work together, we must "chain" their setup.bash files within the bashrc file for complete functionality (in essence, we must source these setup.bash files in a specific order).

Below is a complete section of code that must be placed within the bashrc file for ALL of our working workspaces to be chained properly. The lines pertaining to sim_software and shared_software can be commented/omitted if the user decides not to use them. The lines pertaining to /opt/ros/kinetic and riptide_software must remain.

source /opt/ros/kinetic/setup.bash
source ~/osu-uwrt/sim_software/devel/setup.bash
source ~/osu-uwrt/shared_software/devel/setup.bash
source ~/osu-uwrt/riptide_software/devel/setup.bash

Building riptide_software

ROS is compiled using the catkin build system, and so all of our repos will use catkin. We are using python catkin tools to help the build the command for that is catkin build

Compiling

To compile this repo, you simply execute the catkin_make command from a terminal. As a word of caution, you MUST be inside the folder ~/osu-uwrt/riptide_software to run catkin_make

cd ~/osu-uwrt/riptide_software/
catkin_make /* or now, catkin build*/

In the near future, you will have to clone and compile the control_toolbox because this repo will be dependent on it.