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[ Software Division : Software Onboarding Tutorial ]

Created by [ Rowan Dempster], last modified by [ Charles Zhang] on Jan 04, 2021

For all questions, refer to the discord #tech-support channel.

Prior on the production environment

You may be surprised to hear that the car's battery powers a rugged computer in it's trunk. Every line of self-driving related code written by software teams is compiled and run on that computer. The computer runs on Ubuntu 16.04 and ROS Kinetic (module management + communication), and we have/make drivers which allow us to control the vehicle within code.

Prior on Robot Operating System (ROS)

ROS releases a new version every May, and uses fancy names mapped primarily to Ubuntu versions such as Kinetic (16.04), Lunar (17.04), Melodic (18.04), etc. Many people get confused by the word "Operating System", because they think that ROS is a substitute for personal computer OS as we know it (Windows, Mac OS, Ubuntu, etc.). For more information on why personal computer OS are but a particular embodiment of operating systems, I recommend reading the introductory blurb of Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces. For the sake of onboarding, we can consider ROS to be a build system just like Make/CMake and its parsers, within which you can specify what you want to compile and how. In other words, it's just software that we can install on Ubuntu.

Prior on our workflow

Typical development sessions will involve a iterative cycle of looking at data (rosbags), formulating the problem and solution (structuring the data), and implementing it (write code). Using ROS as our main framework comes with the drawback of its visualization tools not being supported by OpenSSH forwarding. This means to use critical workflow tools like rosrun image_view (needed for video playback of a topic in a rosbag), we would need to launch it on a native Ubuntu machine or Ubuntu VM via GUI.

Setting up your development environmen

1.  Using WATO servers for development

See https://git.uwaterloo.ca/WATonomous/wato_monorepo for a detailed tutorial on how to get set up using WATonomous servers remotely for software development.

2. Getting Acquainted with ROS

• Do some Beginner Tutorials, try up to and including step 8 here: http://wiki.ros.org/ROS/Tutorials

3. Getting [acquainted]

• We use git to manage our source code versioning. Here is a git tutorial if you are wondering what git is: https://guides.github.com/introduction/git-handbook/
• All of WATO's git repository are stored in a Gitlab project on the University's gitlab server, located here: https://git.uwaterloo.ca/WATonomous. To login to gitlab, use your WatIAM credentials.
• Every WATO git repository (that is part of the autonomous stack) is a ROS package. If this is not the case, please complain to the team who owns that repository. So, when you clone a WATO repository , clone in into your catkin_ws/src directory. As you know, the src directory is where all ROS packages are kept in a catkin workspace. After you clone the repositories/packages you want, a simple catkin_make will compile everything, and you're ready to start launching nodes!
• Note: Before cloning a specific repository, i.e prediction, make sure you also clone ros_msgs repo. [Both of which should be your src folder]

See team-specific onboarding guides:

• Path Planning Group
• Perception Group
• Processing Group
• Infrastructure Group

4. Getting your hands on testing data

• We store our ROS bags on the Rugged, and can be accessed through the rosbag server: wato-rugged.uwaterloo.ca:8080
• Simply download the bag you want (you'll probably have no idea what bag you want since they are all very badly named!), and play it.
• see: SSH Access to WATO machines and Rosbag Tutorial

Common errors

Q: Some ROS related command can't be found.
A: Most likely ROS isn't properly sourced or the devel folder wasn't sourced.

\

Q: Could not find the required component `jsk_recognition_msgs`
A: See part 2: Install this ROS dependency: sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-jsk-recognition-msgs, sudo apt install ros-kinetic-jsk-rviz-plugins (for perception)

Comments:

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