Driving the rover remotely using a controller on the base station

Rover setup

Plug the jetson to its 5V USB battery pack. The green LED should turn on and stay on.

Plug the antenna to the jetson. Make sure that you don't plug the POE in the jetson, as this could cause problems. The POE should be plugged in the antenna radio. The POE extremity is the female one, and the regular extremity is the male one.

Plug the CANbus to USB converter to the jetson using a micro-USB to USB cable.

!!! Important !!!
Make sure that the CANbus to USB converter is NOT plugged in to the jetson when it boots, as it can't boot if the CANbus to USB converter is plugged in.

Base station setup

Power up the second antenna. On any base station computer, execute the following commands, while making sur to replace the <your ip number here> placeholder with your actual IP last number, in FOUR TERMINALS (rover-multimaster, rover-node, laptop-multimaster and laptop-node).

export ROS_MASTER_URI=http://192.168.1.<your ip number here>:11311
export ROS_IP=192.168.1.<your ip number here>

In TWO TERMINALS (rover-multimaster and rover-node), connect to the rover by running the following command:

ssh [email protected]

The password is roverudes.

In terminals rover-multimaster AND laptop-multimaster:

roslaunch rover_udes multimaster.launch

In terminal rover-node:

Launch the drives node:

roslaunch rover_control motor_drivers.launch

If the nodes spits a lot of red, kill it, and try again. If it works, it should display something like this:

[ WARN] [1646267758.107408992]: Motor ID 1 : 1
[ WARN] [1646267758.127789545]: Motor ID 2 : 2
[ WARN] [1646267758.129881211]: Motor ID 3 : 3
[ WARN] [1646267758.140614027]: Motor ID 4 : 4

Plug the gamepad controller to the base station computer.

In terminal laptop-node, launch the teleoperation node

roslaunch rover_control simple_teleop.launch

Controlling the rover

The gamepad has two deadman: the two shoulder buttons. Press them both at the same time, and then control the rover using the left joystick. Press only the left shoulder button to move slowly.