RoboRacing WiFi Driving

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"Man vs Machine" redirects here.

The great part about RoboRacing is being able to drive fast cars when for "testing." For fun on Sedani, it can be fun to set up a FPV headset and steering wheel to feel like you are really sitting there driving! You can even test your driving skills versus our autonomous code.

Warning: Moving a vehicle can be dangerous. FPV requires another person to be the "spotter" and have a remote e-stop to kill the car in case of loss of connection. Always range test your connections.

You will note that there is a bit of lag between the input steering and the actual. You may also notice that you do not have very long range with a single access point. That is normal because WiFi can be slow and not long range.

What you need:

  • Sedani (or comparable vehicle with ROS)
  • Laptop with ROS
  • Wireless Access Point (or shared WiFi network)
  • USB Steering wheel (or joystick if you are strapped)
  • FPV Camera (and transmitter)
  • FPV Headset

Setup:

  1. Set up FPV camera on Sedani
  2. Set up access point
  3. Connect Sedani and Laptop to access point
  4. Set up ROS multiple machines. Tutorials [HERE](http://wiki.ros.org/ROS/Tutorials/MultipleMachines) and [HERE](http://roboticsknowledgebase.com/wiki/networking/ros-distributed/).
    1. A quick overview of step 4:
    2. Find the IP Address of each computer
    3. Run roscore on Sedani
    4. Export the IP of Sedani with export ROS_MASTER_URI=http://<SEDANIIP>:11311
    5. Run the same command as in above step on the laptop
    6. Note: Unless you actually put these commands in the bashrc, nodes will only be shared between computers when run in the same terminal that you ran the step 4 commands in.
  5. Plug in the USB steering wheel to the laptop
  6. Now that that roscore is shared, run on the laptop roslaunch rr_platform joystick_driver.launch
  7. On Sedani, run roslaunch rr_platform sedani_motor_relay.launch
  8. Zoom that pasta