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Installation

In this page, we provide the installation procedure for the ChoiRbot package. In the first part of the page we detail the procedure to install ChoiRbot from scratch. If you want to run ChoiRbot in a Docker container, please see the section Docker Installation.

Toolbox download and build

The ChoiRbot toolbox currently supports ROS 2 Dashing Diademata. Please refer to the ROS 2 website for a comprehensive tutorial on how to install ROS 2. We suggest to perform the Desktop Install of ROS 2, which provides useful tools such as RVIZ.

If you do not have a ROS 2 workspace run on a terminal:

mkdir -p ~/dev_ws/src
cd ~/dev_ws/src

To download ChoiRbot, clone the package repository:

git clone https://github.com/OPT4SMART/ChoiRbot.git .

Finally, simply build your workspace:

cd ~/dev_ws
colcon build --symlink-install

Installation of required Python packages

ChoiRbot requires a set of Python packages that can be installed by running (inside the src directory of your workspace):

pip3 install -r requirements.txt

If you are interested in running distributed optimization algorithms, you also need the DISROPT package. You can install it by running:

pip3 install -r requirements_disropt.txt
pip3 install --no-deps disropt

You could also install disropt by directly running pip install disropt. However, this would automatically install additional packages (such as mpi4py) that are not required by ChoiRbot.

Installation of Gazebo and Turtlebot3 files

ChoiRbot allows yo to easily simulate a team of Turtlebot3 mobile robots. You just need to perform the installation steps at this link (PC Setup tab) and to clone the ROS 2 workspace provided here (Gazebo Simulation tab). Then, be sure that the .bashrc file contains the following lines (notice that the paths may need to be adjusted according to your current installation).

export TURTLEBOT3_MODEL=burger
source ~/turtlebot3_ws/install/setup.bash
export ROS_DOMAIN_ID=30 #TURTLEBOT3
export GAZEBO_MODEL_PATH=$GAZEBO_MODEL_PATH:~/turtlebot3_ws/src/turtlebot3/turtlebot3_simulations/turtlebot3_gazebo/models

Docker Installation

The following steps compose a Docker container with ROS 2 Foxy.

• Tested on docker version 20.10.7
• Requires docker compose v1.28.0 or higher

Instructions to build the image and run the container (no GPU)

• Navidate inside the src. NOTE: Your entire src folder will be mounted as a volume in the container.

• To build the image:

    docker-compose -f docker-compose.yml build
  

  NOTE: This step might be time consuming.

• To run the container:

    docker run -p 6080:80 --user root foxy_baseline
  

• Open your browser at http://127.0.0.1:6080/ and click on Connect.

Install the following packages if you have a dedicated NVidia graphics card

• Add the GPG key:

  distribution=$(. /etc/os-release;echo $ID$VERSION_ID) \ && curl -s -L https://nvidia.github.io/nvidia-docker/gpgkey | sudo apt- key add - \ && curl -s -L https://nvidia.github.io/nvidia-docker/$distribution/nvidia-docker.list | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/nvidia-docker.list

• Install the nvidia-docker2 package

  ```
  sudo apt-get update
  ```
    	
  ```
  sudo apt-get install -y nvidia-docker2
  ```
  

• Restart the Docker daemon

  ``` sudo systemctl restart docker

Instructions to build the image and run the container (with GPU)

More content coming soon.