List of Cool Packages and Stacks

[Alex McClung]

Hey guys,

I have been browsing through the list on ros.org for packages and stacks that seem relevant to my robot, I thought id share. I haven't used all the packages but they seemed interesting and relevant. These are ones that are less popular but defiantly worth noting.

• Navigation:
  • differential_drive- This looks like a really useful package, it's independent from the navigation stack, all you have to do is give it parameters about you robot, for example: encoder ticks per metre, base width and desired velocity. It has a PID filter with adjustable parameters. You provide raw encoder readings and it calculates an odom tf and gives you a twist message for the motors.
• User Interface: 

• Web:
• rosbridge- This is the main stack for creating a robot web interface, ros2djs, ros3djs and roslibjs all require rosbridge_server to be run in the background. See http://vimeo.com/66915129 for more info.
• ros2djs- This can show the robots realtime position on a 2D map. It requires Rosbridge to run.

• ros3djs- This is like Rviz in a web browser, you can view 3d maps, markers, point clouds. It also requires rosbridge to run.

• roslibjs- This uses javascript to publish and subscribe to topics and services and control you robot through a web browser.
• mjpeg_server- This takes any image topic and streams into a web browser it also has parameters from the browser, it has an excellent tutorial, I got it running with the Kinect in 5 minutes. 

• Joystick:
• joy – works with most joysticks including Logitech F710 wireless gamepad, great tutorials, easy to use.
• Linux GUI:
• ground_station- This looks like a very cool package, displaying telemetry (like position, orientation and battery) with a very nice looking display using guages. It also can plot GPS location/path over Google satellite imagery.
  

 

 

 

 

• gpsd_viewer – An alternative to the GPS plot on ground_station.

 

 

• Sensors:
  
• GPS:
• nmea_gps_driver– Easy to use GPS parser/driver, specify a serial port and baud rate and it publishes ROS messages.
• gps_umd- A stack for interfacing to the pre-installed Linux GPSD daemon and publishes ROS messages. It also has a node for converting GPS readings to Odometry. I haven't been able to the GPSD daemon working with my GPS Reciever. But it looks better then the nmea driver once functional.
• IMU:
• razor_imu_9dof – This will interface with a lot of imu boards with slight modification. I believe Gav has a script for the Pololu Mini-IMU 9.
• Kinect : I won't bother with the huge list of Kinect drivers (openni is what I'm curently using), but I have found a few less common, but interesting packages:
• kinect_aux – This gives control of the motor in the base of the Kinect and the onboard LED. It allows you to publish messages to ROS from the Accelerometer and its current tilt angle. The package is currently being updated and Catkinized according to the ROS-Users mailing list. Someone has written a patch and added a Median filter to the accelerometer and it seems to work great: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4XdehchrVU and https://github.com/sevenbitbyte/kinect

• ar_kinect- Is a node which takes RGB point clouds from the Kinect and outputs a transform between the camera and a recognized marker (AR marker

• Vision:
• vision_opencv- Converts between ROS Image messages and OpenCV images for Image processing.
• ar_pose- Marker position estimation using AR markers. Really Cool!  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6ytrF-YKh4

• Sound:
  
• audio_common- Includes audio recording and playback. Also text to speech. really simple, great tutorials.

Cheers,

Alex

[Gav]

Very nice work, Alex! 

That's a good list of useful packages. 

Cheers,

Gavin