A first step guide to PhaROS
PhaROS is a collection of Pharo libraries that implements the ROS (Robot Operating System ) based client protocol. It allows developing robotic applications right in the Pharo environment by providing an abstract software layer between Pharo and ROS. This guide makes an assumption that readers already have some basic knowledge about ROS, if this is not the case, please check the following links before going any further on this page:
AntOSDK tutorial: Developing a simple text editor
AntOS API in a nutshell
AntOS provides an abstract API for application development. The core API contains three main elements: the UI API, the VFS API and the VDB API, as shown in the following graph:
The UI API defines the basic UI elements such as Window, List, Tree, Dialogs, etc, and provides a generic interface for application and dialog UI development. UI design consists two steps: (1) the first step is to layout UI elements using antOS' scheme syntax (in XML format); (2) the second step is to handle user interaction using the coffeescript/ Javascript API.
Setting up a software stack for autonomous mono robot exploration and mapping using ROS
Prerequisites
This setup is performed and documented on an Ubuntu system with the following software stack:
- ** Ubuntu 16.04 LTS ** (may work on other distribution though)
- ROS kinetic: if you don't have ROS pre-installed, please refer to this tutorial http://wiki.ros.org/kinetic/Installation/Ubuntu. I suggest to use the full desktop installation configuration, this will take a while (> 2 GB)
- Gazebo for simulation (it is installed by default if you choose the full desktop installation when installing ROS)
- GIT (
sudo apt-get install git) - Catkin for package building (installed by default when installing ROS)
To follow this post, some basic knowledge on ROS is needed: