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dev robots

ROS project setup and overview

As an interlude from checking out Blender/phobos, I saw that the big free robot technology effort of the 2010s was probably ROS, the robot operating system, and as it has been around for a long time, it has had its own established ways, in the pre-phobos days. Before these kids could just click their doodads and evolve silicon lifeforms when they felt like it.

No, phobos documentation is actually just a bit terse, so let’s watch some Gazebo videos. This dude just jumps in, expecting you to have things set up. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41234957/catkin-command-not-found but this guy and me “Probably forgot to set up the environment after installing ROS.

So yeah, what the hell is catkin? So, it’s like how ruby on rails wants you to ask it to make boilerplate for you. So we had to run:

0 mkdir chicken_project
1 cd chicken_project/
2 ls (nothing here, boss)
3 mkdir src
4 cd src
5 catkin_init_workspace
6 cd ..
7 catkin_make
8 source /opt/ros/chicken_project/devel/setup.bash

So, starting 53 seconds in:

https://youtu.be/qi2A32WgRqI?t=53

Ok so his time guesstimate is a shitload of time. We’re going to go for the shoot first approach. Ok he copy-pastes some code, and apparently you have to copy it from the youtube video. No thanks.

So this was his directory structure, anyway.

cd src
catkin_create_pkg my_simulations
cd my_simulations/
mkdir launch
cd launch/
touch my_world.launch
cd ..
mkdir world
cd world
touch empty_world.world

That is funny. Touch my world. But he’s leading us on a wild goose chase. We can’t copy paste from youtube, dumbass.