Proportional Robot Controller with ROS

About the project

This project seeks to move the turtlesim robot to a desired destination defined by x and y cordinates. The objective of the proportional ($K_p$) controller is to minimize the error between the current robot position and the desired position. This is achieved by retrieving the euclidean distance error and the angular error and publishing commands to move the robot such that these errors are minimised.

In order to move to the desired location, the turtlesim will first turn in the direction of the desired destination (minimizing the angular error) and then move towards that point (minimizing the euclidean distance error).

Internally, the robot controller publishes the robot command velocity at a frequency of 10 $Hz$ and subscribes to another topic to get the robot pose.

Built with:

• ROS Noetic
• CMake
• Catkin
• C++

Getting Started

Prerequisites

Install ROS Noetic from http://wiki.ros.org/noetic/Installation

Installation

1. Create a catkin workspace

2. Clone the repo into <catkin workspace>/src with:

git clone https://github.com/denis-mutuma/proportional-robot-controller.git

3. Run catkin_make in the catkin workspace to build the project

4. Install tutlesim by running sudo apt-get install ros-$(rosversion -d)-turtlesim

Usage

1. In a new terminal run roscore to start ros master

2. In a new terminal run turtlesim using: rosrun turtlesim turtlesim_node and a new window similar to the one below will be opened:

3. In a new terminal run rosrun practical goto_xy to run the proportional robot contoller and you'll be prompted to provide the x and y cordinates via the terminal. Enter values for x and why between 0 and 11. You should see the turtle turning (if need be) and moving to the desired location with an output similar to this:

4. The turtle will move to the desired position and repeating this multiple times will produce something similar the image below:

Contributing

1. Fork the Project

2. Create your Feature Branch (git checkout -b feature/AmazingFeature)

3. Commit your Changes (git commit -m 'Add some AmazingFeature')

4. Push to the Branch (git push origin feature/AmazingFeature)

5. Open a Pull Request

License

Distributed under the BSD License.