It's a navigational robot that has sensors and a camera, including night vision.
To control Scout Bot we need to setup the ROS environment compatible with the bot hardware on your mac.
I built a few tools and apps for different purposes. I couldn't find anything in Python for macOS, so I reversed-engineered some or leveraged other projects (Linux-based) to put things together. Works reliably for what I needed to do.
Just run pip install -r requirements.txt to install the dependencies
I made a swift version, too, but I need to clean it up before posting it here (don't hold your breath :-)
The Python version uses PyGame, so you get all the benefits of keyboards and joystick support.
getcolorcamera.py streams live from the bot in color to your Mac. No joystick support.
snoop.py supports joystick, b/w or color. Change the IP address inside the code where your ROS rely is running.
Below are all supported keys, or if you have a joystick connected to the host machine where ROS is connected, you can pilot with that, too.
- W: Move forward
- S: Move backward
- A: Rotate left
- D: Rotate right
- Q: Strafe left
- E: Strafe right
- P: Increase speed
- O: Decrease speed
- Space: Take a screenshot
- H: Go home (not implemented yet)
- 9: Turn on light 1 (not implemented yet)
- 0: Turn on light 2 (not implemented yet)
- Esc: Exit program
under the tools folder there are useful utilties hacked together to reverse engineering nodes and other ROS stuff. I was completely new to the framework so I built bricks and mortar to figure things out. Your mile vary based on your ROS knowledge.