Udacity Robotics Nanodegree

Project #2: Go Chase It

Introduction

This project involves designing and building a mobile robot that is capable of chasing and following white colored balls.

Structure

There are two packages within this repository:

1. my_robot

This package defines the mobile robot under URDF as well the world that it is housed within.

2. ball_chaser

This package contains two nodes which are responsible for locating the position of the white ball in the camera field of view and then sending the corresponding commands to the mobile robot to follow the white ball.

Setup

First, install Gazebo and ROS on Linux.

Then, create a catkin workspace with a src/ directory and initialize the workspace:

$ mkdir -p catkin_ws/src
$ cd catkin_ws/src
$ catkin_init_workspace

Next, download the packages within this repository called 'my_robot' and 'ball_chaser':

$ git clone https://github.com/grejj/RoboticsND-Go-Chase-It.git
$ cp -R RoboticsND-Go-Chase-It/ball_chaser .
$ cp -R RoboticsND-Go-Chase-It/my_robot .
$ rm -rf RoboticsND-Go-Chase-It

Then, build the packages:

$ cd ..
$ catkin_make

To open gazebo with the robot in it:

$ source devel/setup.bash
$ roslaunch my_robot world.launch

Finally, start the ball_chaser nodes in another terminal so that the robot can start following the white ball:

$ source devel/setup.bash
$ roslaunch ball_chaser ball_chaser.launch

Now, when the white ball is moved within view of the front-facing camera on the robot, the robot will begin to chase the white ball.