Docking Robot

🔋 A simulated example of Open Navigation's Nav2 Docking Framework in the wild! This project makes use of the Husarion's simulated Panther robot that was placed in a warehouse-like Gazebo environment. The robot's objective is to safely approach and connect to a charging station marked with an AprilTag.

Prerequisites

• 🐋 Docker Compose

Getting Started

Just go ahead and run these few commands in your terminal:

$ git clone https://github.com/rayferric/docking_robot.git
$ cd docking_robot
$ docker-compose up
# docker-compose -f compose.amdgpu.yaml up
# docker-compose -f compose.nvidia.yaml up

Once the image is built and the container boots up, you should see two windows pop up on your desktop - Gazebo and RViz.

Important

When running the container, if none of the windows show up and you happen to see this error message:

Authorization required, but no authorization protocol specified

...it indicates that your Docker group does not have access to the X server and thus you cannot run GUI applications inside containers. In order to fix it, you may need to run the following command:

$ xhost +local:docker

Then you can use the "2D Goal Pose" tool in RViz to make the Panther navigate to any location on the map.

To initiate the docking sequence, attach a terminal to the container and use the DockRobot action:

$ docker exec -it docking_robot-docking_robot-1 bash
$ source /ws/install/setup.bash
$ ros2 action send_goal /dock_robot opennav_docking_msgs/action/DockRobot "{dock_id: home_dock}"

The robot should start making its way to the charging station and, in the end, attach to it.

Undock with:

$ ros2 action send_goal /undock_robot opennav_docking_msgs/action/UndockRobot "{dock_type: simple_charging_dock}"

Note

If the performance of the simulation is low, running with a discrete GPU might help. For AMD devices, you can use the compose.amdgpu.yaml configuration:

$ docker-compose -f compose.amdgpu.yaml up

About

Tech Stack

• 🐢 ROS 2
• 🛖 Gazebo Fortress
• 🧭 Nav2
• 🐳 Docker

Authors

• Ray Ferric (rayferric)

License

You are free to reuse any part of my code in this repository without any restrictions. However most of the resources used by my project (particularly the Panther robot by Husarion) have their own respective licenses, so please refer to them before using them in your own projects.