tangobot

An Android application integrating a mobile base (Kobuki) with a Tango enabled device (Lenvo Phab 2 Pro) and ROS. The aim of this application is to show how to enable a robot to navigate running all the required code on Android.

This work is developed by Ekumen in collaboration with Intermodalics and Google Tango. Do not hesitate to give us feedback if something is broken or if you think it lacks some features. The best way to do this is by adding issues to this repository.

Kickstart

We encourage you to read the robot's wiki entry for more information about the required hardware components and step-by-step tutorials.

Running the app demo

Follow these steps to get your robot up and navigating in an empty map, using a computer for visualization and for sending goals. We assume you have all the required hardware components.

Pre requisites

You will need to have Ubuntu 14.04 & ROS Indigo or Ubuntu 16.04 & ROS Kinetic. You can check Installing ROS section if you don't have ROS installed. For these instructions, we will assume ROS Kinetic; replace kinetic by indigo if that's not your case when necessary.

Software & robot setup

To get the robot up and running without needing to build the app from source, install Tangobot app from Google's Play Store in your device. You will also need to get a helper package in your computer to launch the visualizer.

First, clone the Tangobot respository:

mkdir -p ~/tangobot_ws/src
cd ~/tangobot_ws/src
git clone https://github.com/ekumenlabs/tangobot

Then, install the package dependencies in case you don't have them, and source the environment:

cd ~/tangobot_ws
source /opt/ros/kinetic/setup.bash
rosdep update
rosdep install --from-paths src/tangobot/tangobot_desktop
catkin_make --pkg tangobot_desktop

Connect your device to your robot base using a "USB on the go" cable. The device's main camera should have the same direction of the robot's front. You can check the robot's wiki article for more information about the hardware setup and how to place the Android device over the robot.

Starting the demo!

First, start a ROS Master from a separate terminal by running roscore. Launch the application in your Android device, and specify your PC's IP address to connect to the ROS master (you may optionally run the ROS master on the device directly; for this example we will assume that the ROS master is running on your computer).

Before running the visualizer, ensure your network is properly configured. To do so, run the following command (you can check your system's IP address running ifconfig):

export ROS_IP=YOUR_COMPUTER_IP_ADDRESS

Then, run the visualizer:

roslaunch tangobot_desktop tangobot_demo_visualizer.launch

You should now see the robot in the center of an empty map in RVIZ. You can now send goal poses from there to navigate.

Building the application from source

Pre requisites

To build the application, we assume a clean installation of Ubuntu 16.04 in combination with ROS Kinetic; it should also work in Ubuntu 14.04 & ROS Indigo.

Installing ROS

Run the following commands to install ROS in your system (taken from this guide). Full desktop installation is recommended:

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://packages.ros.org/ros/ubuntu $(lsb_release -sc) main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ros-latest.list'
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://ha.pool.sks-keyservers.net:80 --recv-key 421C365BD9FF1F717815A3895523BAEEB01FA116
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-desktop-full
sudo rosdep init
rosdep update
echo "source /opt/ros/kinetic/setup.bash" >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc
sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-rosjava-build-tools

Downloading source code

Clone the repository if you haven't done it already:

mkdir -p ~/tangobot_ws/src
cd ~/tangobot_ws/src
git clone https://github.com/ekumenlabs/tangobot

Building roscpp_android

This application uses native code to run. To be able to cross-compile native code to Android devices, the roscpp_android environment has to be installed and built. Run the commands described below (taken from the official guide). It will take a long while on the first build:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install curl git
curl -sSL https://get.docker.com/ | sudo sh
mkdir ~/ros-android-ndk
cd ~/ros-android-ndk
git clone https://github.com/ekumenlabs/roscpp_android.git
cd roscpp_android
./do_docker.sh --portable

Android Studio

This is the recommended tool to edit the code. It will also help you install the required Android SDKs. We will need to install Java first:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install openjdk-8-jdk
echo "export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-8-openjdk-amd64/" >> ~/.bashrc

Use openjdk-7 if your are in Ubuntu 14.04.

Then, follow these steps:

• Download Android Studio from here, install it, and launch it.
• Import the "tangobot_app" directory by clicking file -> new -> import (it should be in ~/tangobot_ws/src/tangobot/tangobot_app).
• From the tools menu, select Android -> SDK manager. Install SDK versions 25 & 22, as well as Android NDK (this should download NDK > r13).
• Check whether Android Studio created a local.properties file inside "tangobot_app", and if it contains the proper directories for your recently installed SDK and NDK.
• Add your SDK directory to your PATH environment variable: export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/Android/Sdk/ndk-bundle (assuming the default path where Android Studio installs it). You may optionally add that line to your ~/.bashrc file to add it permanently.
• Inside the directory tangobot_app/app/src/main/cpp create a file named local-properties.mk. Add a single line to it: $(call import-add-path, {your path to your roscpp_android environment}/ros-android-ndk/roscpp_android/output) (i.e. the output folder of your recently installed roscpp_android environment. Use the absolute path without the curly braces).

Build and install the app

Almost there! Once you have all the pre-requisites installed, just go to the root of your catkin workspace and run catkin make:

cd ~/tangobot_ws
catkin_make

Congratulations! You just built your apk file. You can find it in tangobot_app/app/build/outputs/apk. You can install it running adb install app-debug.apk from that directory.