macorobots/roomac repository overview

⁠Roomac ROS

Roomac is a low-cost autonomous mobile manipulation robot that consists of a differential drive mobile base and a 5-DoF manipulator with a gripper. The costs of the whole construction summed up to around 550$ and using this platform I was able to prepare a proof-of-concept application - fetching a bottle to the user. In this repository you can find docker image used to achieve this goal, as well as a simulation in Gazebo, which you can use to test it yourself.

Here you can see some gifs demonstrating the robot's capabilities (and here⁠ you can watch the full demo).

⁠Simulation demo

If you would like to quickly run the application of fetching a bottle to the defined location you can use an already prepared map and config. First start simulation container, there are two possibilities:

• Nvidia GPU config (make sure that you have Nvidia Container Runtime installed)

  docker compose -f docker/compose_simulation_demo_nvidia.yaml up
  

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• other GPUs

  xhost local:root
  docker compose -f docker/compose_simulation_demo.yaml up
  

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Nvidia configuration is recommended, as it has better performance.

Then to execute fetch bottle run:

docker exec roomac_simulation bash -c \
 "source /home/roomac/catkin_ws/devel/setup.bash &&
  rostopic pub /pick_and_bring/goal roomac_msgs/PickAndBringActionGoal {}"

And that's it! The robot should navigate to the table, pick up the bottle and return to the starting position. Please note that the accuracy of this operation isn't 100% and the robot may fail (especially detecting the robot's position in Kinect above table is prone to failure).