Welcome to the Cellphone_Robot project! Through this project we are aiming to expand on Android based robotics. myRobot, the app within this repository, was created to control a small ROS controlled car-robot. The project showcases how an Android phone can significantly enhance a ROS-based robot through leveraging the many APIs out there. This project utlizes multiple libraries as well as APIs. In this user guide we will walk you through setting up the project for yourself and setting up the necessary access keys to use the app in tandem with a ROS project. That being said, all the libraries and APIs can be replaced or expanded upon so do not feel limited to our implementation of the repo.
This repo allow the robot to: access a Natural Language Processor, translate text, send Slack messages, and communicate back and forth with a ROS network that operates on an autonomous navigation robot. In our hardware setup, we had the ROS network running on a Raspberry Pi 3 mounted on the RC robot itself. We used a portable rechargable battery to make this happen. The phone is also mounted on the robot using a cellphone holder. Have fun experimenting!
The app is fundamentally acting as an extension to the robot, regardless of what the robot is or what it is capable of. The app acts as a higher level method of controlling the robot, while leveraging its access to the web and the many tools out there for Android phones. The user can then communicate with the phone through texting or Instant Messaging over NLP to command the robot. This project is essentially a template for people to get creative with. If you have a ROS based robot and an Android phone, you can do all sorts of cool stuff. This repo is more tailored for our SLAM and Autonomous navigation project, but for a more general version, please check our previous work.
This project is a follow up on our previous work Cellphone_Robot_OpenCV and is tilored for our SLAM and Autonomous navigation project. You do not to be an Android/ROS expert to use this project. That being said, you should be familiar with both environemnts to use this project to its full potential. Furthermore, the Setup guide assumes you have some familiarity with navigating Ubuntu systems.
This user guide focuses mainly on setting up the Android app; however, to communicate with the ROS network a few steps need to be taken. This repo contains the ROS project we created to test the app with. To use the app you do not need to clone the whole project. There is only one script that your ROS project needs to have. That user guide will show you how to set up the script for your own uses, or you can just clone the whole project.
To connect the Android to ROS, you need to make sure the ROS_MASTER_URI is correctly referenced and that depends on whether the connection is over WIFI or USB.
Ensure the ROS host machine, in our case the Rhaspberry PI, and the Android phone are connected to the same WIFI network.
On the ROS host, copy the Pi's wlan0 IP address. Then in terminal, go to your root directory, open .bashrc, and type the following at the bottom of the script.
export ROS_IP=DEVICE_IP_ADDRESS
export ROS_MASTER_URI=http://DEVICE_IP_ADDRESS:11311/
On the Android side, go to strings.xml located under /app/src/main/res/values and type in the ROS_MASTER_URI in the corresponding location.
<string name="rosIP">http://DEVICE_IP_ADDRESS:11311/</string>To update your ROS enviroments, run the following in a terminal:
source ~/.bashrc
Now you can launch roscore on the ROS host and the app will connect to it over WIFI.
Connect the phone to the ROS host. Turn off WIFI connection on the ROS host device. On the Android, go to Settings > More > Tethering & portable hotspost and turn on USB tethering.
On the ROS host, copy the Pi's ethernet IP address. Then in terminal, go to your root directory, open .bashrc, and type the following at the bottom of the script.
export ROS_IP=DEVICE_IP_ADDRESS
export ROS_MASTER_URI=http://DEVICE_IP_ADDRESS:11311/
On the Android side, go to strings.xml located under /app/src/main/res/values and type in the ROS_MASTER_URI in the corresponding location.
<string name="rosIP">http://DEVICE_IP_ADDRESS:11311/</string>
To update your ROS enviroments, run the following in a terminal:
source ~/.bashrc
Now you can launch roscore on the ROS host and the app will connect to it over USB.
The ROS package can be found here.
For setting up Dialogflow and trying sample app, please click here.
For detailed explanation of natual language process service, you can go here.
The app includes many APIs, all of which need access keys. Below are the respective links for obtaining them. All you need to do to have the APIs work is paste the keys in the corresponding string.xml allocation.
This link will introduce how to register a bot and interact with it. Also, there are various Libraries, Plugins, and Sample Apps that you can use. In this project, we implement slack-api-android .
Make sure you add the following line to your build.gradle.
allprojects {
repositories {
maven { url 'https://jitpack.io' }
}
}and:
dependencies {
compile 'com.github.pschroen:slack-api-android:c66cc8d997'
}Check here for usage.