Roomba 500 series ROS drivers

ROS drivers for the roomba 500 series robots ** Forked **

View the Project on GitHub Arkapravo/roomba_500_ROS_drivers

roomba_500_ROS_drivers

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ROS drivers for the roomba 500 series robots

Fork in

The following two ROS packages are forked in from ISR - University of Coimbra repository; https://code.google.com/p/isr-uc-ros-pkg/
(1) roomba_robot
(2) serial_communication

Installation

ROS Electric or ROS Fuerte installation (http://ros.org/wiki) is needed for these packages. Build and install

serial_communication with

rosmake cereal_port

and roomba_robot with

rosmake roomba_500_series

and make sure that these are on the ROS PATH.

Interfacing the robot

Step One

Connect the Roomba with the computer using a FTDI USB cable, Bluetooth connectivity will also suffice. To check for the port and connection of the FTDI USB cable, type in

dmesg | grep tty

in the terminal window, it should give output as this,

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this confirms that the FTDI USB cable has been interfaced with the computer.

Step Two

Switch on the robot, the CLEAN button will have a light on

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Step Three

Start an instance of the master and in another terminal window type in

rosrun roomba_500_series roomba560_node

the above node is specifically made for Roomba 560 robot, for any other model consider trying out the following,

rosrun roomba_500_series roomba500_light_node

that should make the lights of the robot go off and give an output as this,

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Now the robot can be controlled by ROS nodes, try teleoperation etc.

Testing

on Roomba 560

By Arkapravo Bhaumik (arkapravobhaumik@gmail.com) and Koushik Kabiraj (koushik.atti@gmail.com)

On a ROS Electric installation (Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, Ubuntu 11.04 and Ubuntu 11.10)

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on Roomba 521

By Devasena Prasad (devasena.prasad@gmail.com)

On a ROS Groovy installation (Ubuntu 12.04)

Permission for USB must be changed using

sudo chmod 777 /dev/ttyUSB*

roomba500_light_node works fine

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