Email Quade Kirby at qkirby@ufl.edu if you are interested in helping out or if you want information about the project.
The competition rules contain all of the information that will be needed to design and build our robot.
The software for this project is heavily based on the software from the previous year's software due to the fact that the mechanical and electrical platforms were very similar. Important files from last year were merged into this repository and then modified to work with the new parts of the platform. See the final pull request for a breakdown of what worked and what did not.
In order to develop software for the robot, you will need to become familiar with a few tools that are the building blocks of our codebase and workflow:
- Ubuntu - This is the linux-based operating system that we use. Currently, only Ubuntu 14.04 is supported by our software stack, so that is the version you will need. If you are not familiar with Linux and Bash, I recommend you read through this tutorial.
- Python - This is the main programming language used on the project and the one recommended to new programmers. C++ is also an option if you feel more comfortable with it, but the learning curve to use it with ROS is a bit steeper.
- ROS - The Robot Operating System is what we use to ensure that nodes running on the robot can communicate properly. For more information, we recommend visiting the site and reading through a couple of the tutorials.
- Git - Git is our version control software; it allows us to keep track of the history of files so that we know who made which changes and revert back to previous versions if neccessary. We use a forking workflow to facilitate contributions. For a beginner's introduction to git, see this tutorial.
- OpenCV - This library enables us to perform complex robot vision tasks in a simple and elegant way. If you are intrested in robot vision, this will be your go to.
IEEE2018 has many dependencies that may be cumbersome to install by hand. There is a convenient install script to fetch and install them automatically. This script must be run on an Ubuntu installation either on a physical machine or in a virtual machine.
The following command will fetch and run the script:
sudo apt-get -qq update && sudo apt-get install -qq curl && bash <(curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ufieeehw/IEEE2017/master/install.sh)
The install script is intended to handle every single thing that needs to be installed to develop for the robot. If it does not work, something has gone terribly wrong and it needs to be fixed. If you resolve an issue while installing, please fix it in the install script and submit a pull-request with the changes. Otherwise, notify the script's maintainer (currently Anthony Olive).
The script will create all of the files and directories it needs within the selected catkin workspace. If the script has previously been run, it will not run initial set up tasks that have already been performed unless they need to be updated. This means that the script will respect workspaces with git repositories already present in them.