The Tortoisebot

Our friendly little cleaning robot.

Hardware

The tortoisebot is modified vacuum robot with some goodies to make it fun to use.

It has the following sensors:

• 3 front bumpers
• Kinect
• IR sensor

If you want to use the IR sensors, there are IR emitters in the lab which are made for the robot. You can use these to create invisible walls or to make a homebase for the robot.

Using

There are a number of launch files to make using the tortoisebot easier. Below, I will give a quick sumary of what the various launch files do.

• tortoise.launch: This file launches both the turtlebot driver and the Kinect as well as creating a view window to see the output of the Kinect. This is the file you normaly want to run.

• driver.lanch: Starts the node which communicates with the tortoisebot and brings up a state publisher and the URDF robot description.

• kinect.launch: Starts the Kinect and sets it up for use with localization and people detection.

• joystick_teleop.launch: Runs joystick teleoperation.

• keyboard_teleop.launch: Runs keyboard teleoperation.

Follower Demo

killall XnSensorServer ; roslaunch tortoise_launch tortoise.launch  
rosrun talker node.py
rosrun openni_tracker openni_tracker
rosrun tortoise_follow node.py