scavenger_interface

An interface to simplify connecting and interacting with the Scavenger Hunt Challenge introduced in the paper

Harel Yedidsion, Jennifer Suriadinata, Zifan Xu, Stefan Debruyn, and Peter Stone. "A Scavenger Hunt for Service Robots" International Conference on Robotics and Autonmation (ICRA). 2021

Installation

This repo depends on the scavenger_hunt_api and darknet_ros repositories. If neither of these are already installed locally: In the src of a catkin workspace,

$ git clone https://github.com/leggedrobotics/darknet_ros.git --recursive

$ git clone https://github.com/utexas-bwi/scavenger_hunt_api.git --recursive

$ git clone https://github.com/utexas-bwi/scavenger_interface.git

Building

Building should be as simple as invoking catkin tools in the root of your workspace.

$ catkin build

Running

Pre-running

Follow the instructions on the scavenger_hunt_api README for creating an account, and changing the config file with your credentials.

Change the perception topics in scavenger_interface.launch if necessary. The image_topic and image_detection_topic should be the topics of an RGB image stream from a camera, and a image recognition stream, respectively. Currently they're configured for the default values for darknet_ros.

Launching a Passive Hunter

To run, you'll need to bring up your robot and perception systems as usual. This may be base drivers & YOLO, etc.

E.g. $ roslaunch darknet_ros darknet_ros.launch

Then bring up the passive hunter launch file:

$ roslaunch scavenger_interface scavenger_interface.launch hunt_name:="My Hunt"

Where hunt_name should be specified by you. By default the hunter_launcher is configured to bring up a Passive Hunter.

Code Overview

This package contains the following primary components:

• scavenger_ros_interface : a ROS-dependent library that directly interacts with the API and provides simple ways to {get a hunt, retrieve tasks, submit proofs} via the API
• include/hunter.h : an abstract class that serves as a template for a custom Hunter implentation for your own robot platform
• passive_hunter : an implementation of a scavenger Hunter that attempts to fufill scavenger tasks passively, i.e. while carrying out another primary function
• hunter_launcher : this is the launchpad for a scavenger Hunter. It utilizes the hunter.h form to query a Hunter in a generic way.

Making Changes

Creating your own Hunter is as simple as creating a new class that implements the hunter.h abstract methods, and changing the type of Hunter that gets created in hunter_launcher

Feel free to create new launch files as appropriate.