Panther

Panther (Powerful Autonomous eNTity High-End Robot) is an outdoor tracked robot, with a ZED stereocamera and an NVIDIA Jetson TX2, this robot can interact with all objects around it.

This robot can climbs little rocks and little bumps. it is heavy with 9kg and with the big size 42cm with, 40cm deep and 30cm height, have a ground clearance of 7cm. The tracks have a particular damping system, with three different dampers to absorbe all vibration when the robot drift on the grass.

For more information about hardware and software, please see http://www.rnext.it/panther.

Installation

By checking out from repositories, you can always stay up to date with the latest version. Use the following commands to check out the Panther stacks:

1. Install last ROS LTS release: http://wiki/ROS/Installation, please select Ubuntu platform.

2. Install ROS distribution

   sudo apt-get install ros-$ROS_DISTRO-ros
   sudo apt-get install ros-$ROS_DISTRO-navigation

3. Create a catkin workspace (see Catkin Tutorial)

4. Clone in catkin workspace the following repositories

   cd ~/catkin_ws
   https://github.com/rbonghi/panther.git
   https://github.com/rbonghi/roboteq_control.git
   https://github.com/stereolabs/zed-ros-wrapper.git

5. Install all required repositories:

    rosdep install -y --from-paths src --ignore-src --rosdistro $ROS_DISTRO

6. Compile all code

   catkin_make

Getting Started

1. Bringup the real robot

Take the Panther robot and power on the robot:

ssh nvidia@panther.local

and launch:

sudo ./jetson_clock.sh
roslaunch panther_bringup bringup.launch

In the shell you can read the roboteq node launch and all other nodes, after the robot is ready to receive velocity commands. Proceed with starting nodes that supply velocity commands like teleoperation nodes.

2. Teleoperation

Panther can be teleoperated using a joystick or with a rqt interface.

1. Joystick control

   • roslaunch panther_control teleop.launch

2. Rqt visualization interface

    rqt

and select in plug-in rqt_robot_steering

3. Visualisation

To run the Panther visualization you just type

• roslaunch panther_rviz_launchers view_robot.launch

on the base station (this command will not run on the robot itself as the robot does not provide any graphical capabilities).

Simulation

To run the Panther gazebo simulation is required to launch only:

• roslaunch panther_gazebo empty_world.launch

For convenience we will additionally install a set of RViz launchers, which will bring up RViz already configured for our use case.