Phoenixbot (Olin College's Sustainable Agricultural Robot Platform)

The Phoenixbot is Olin College's first sustainable agricultural robot platform, developed my students and faculty. The robot platform is addressing the need for sustainable, ecological weed management strategies for healthier and more sustainable agriculture. It is designed on the farm-ng Amiga micro tractor platform.

Repository Summary

• phoenixbot_description: contains the URDF description files for the phoenixbot, sensors, etc.

• phoenixbot_gazebo: contains model, world, launch and configuration files to simulate the phoenixbot in Gazebo.

Installation

The standard installation for PhoenixBot packages is local, instructions for which are found in the following section. However, a simpler install method is the devcontainer. If you would like to run PhoenixBot code in the devcontainer, skip down to ROS Development Container.

Install Locally

This system was tested on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and ROS2 Humble.

1. Create your ROS2 workspace and clone the repository

mkdir -p ~/ros2_ws/src
cd ~/ros2_ws/src
git clone https://github.com/Olin-HAIR-Lab/phoenixbot.git 

2. Install all the relevant ROS dependencies

cd ~/ros2_ws
sudo rosdep init
rosdep update
rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src --rosdistro humble -r -y

3. Source the ROS installation and workspace overlay (do only once)

echo "source /opt/ros/humble/setup.bash" >> ~/.bashrc
echo "source ~/ros2_ws/install/setup.bash" >> ~/.bashrc

source ~/.bashrc

3. Build the package(s)

# navigate to the root of the workspace and build the packages
cd ~/ros2_ws
colcon build --symlink-install

ROS Development Container

Provides an easy setup of ROS with the Dev Container extension of VS Code. The setup was originally created using the VS Code Docker Guide in the ROS 2 documentation, but has been modified by Eruvae and again for our specific use-case.

Prerequisites

You have to install VS Code, Docker, and the Dev Container extension for VS Code. The installation of VS Code on Ubuntu is described here. For a guide to set up dev containers, check out this tutorial. For installing docker on Ubuntu, you can use the docker apt repository, as described in the docker docs. The official docker packages of Ubuntu may also work, but may be older versions.

NVIDIA GPU acceleration

To enable GPU acceleration in the containers, make sure you also install the NVIDIA Container Toolkit. Note: If you already have the CUDA apt repository set up, it includes the nvidia-container-toolkit package, so you don't need to add the nvidia-container apt repository. Run:

sudo apt-get install -y nvidia-container-toolkit
sudo nvidia-ctk runtime configure --runtime=docker
sudo systemctl restart docker

In devcontainer.json, make sure "--gpus", "all" is added to runArgs (this is already the case for the workspaces in this repository), or configure it to use a specific device.

Workspace setup

The phoenixbot repo contains a hidden .devcontainer folder with the configuration files for the container. To start up the container, you can press F1 and search for "Dev Containers: Open Folder in Container...". Alternatively, you can navigate to the folder in a terminal and open it with "code .". VS Code should recognize the .devcontainer configuration and ask you if you want to reopen the folder in the container. If it doesn't, you can also press F1 and search for "Dev Containers: Rebuild and Reopen in Container". If you change your configuration while being inside of the container and need to rebuild it, select "Dev Containers: Rebuild Container".

You may want to modify the files for your setup:

PhoenixBot Packages & Dependencies

This devcontainer by default only includes the PhoenixBot repository. However, by uncommenting lines in the "mounts" section of devcontainer.json, you can include additional PhoenixBot packages for development.

When including additional packages in the devcontainer, it expects a specific file-structure on the host machine. If you still need to clone/organize these packages, follow the instructions here. Other packages, such as phoenixbot_navigation or phoenixbot_weeding should sit in the same parent folder as phoenixbot, as shown:

ros2_ws
`-- src
    |-- phoenixbot
    `-- phoenixbot_navigation

Once the devcontainer is created, workspace dependencies will be installed via rosdep and the included packages will be built with colcon.

How to Run

Start the Gazebo simulation

ros2 launch phoenixbot_gazebo gazebo_world.launch.py

NOTE: It may take a few minutes to come up the first time around, so please be patient.

If everything has been installed correctly, you should see Gazebo and Rviz windows open as below:

Move the robot using keyboard teleoperation

# first, install the dependency
sudo apt install ros-humble-teleop-twist-keyboard

# run the command in a new terminal
ros2 run teleop_twist_keyboard teleop_twist_keyboard

Control the robot with the keyboard keys as below: