Toposens ROS Driver

ROS packages for working with Toposens 3D ultrasonic sensors. Developed and tested for ROS Noetic on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa) and ROS Melodic on Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic).

Detailed documentation for the packages along with a set of tutorials on using them with Toposens sonars can be found on our the ROS Wiki page: http://wiki.ros.org/toposens

Setup ROS

This section is for users who are new to ROS (Robot Operating System) and need guidance in setting up their initial environment.

• Install ROS on your machine:

  • For Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa): Installation
  • For Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic): Installation

• Install catkin tools:

  • For Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa):

  sudo apt install python3-catkin-tools

• For Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic):

  sudo apt install python-catkin-tools

• Setup your catkin workspace:

  mkdir -p ~/catkin_ws/src && cd ~/catkin_ws && catkin init

Our tutorials assume that you use catkin tools instead of the older catkin_make commands. If you are more comfortable with the latter, simply switch all occurrences of catkin build in the documentation with catkin_make_isolated. If you are ready to switch an existing workspace that was previously built with catkin_make, call catkin clean to enable builds with catkin tools.

Build

Clone the toposens metapackage into your catkin workspace. Add --recurse-submodules option to also get Toposens Library that is required for building the toposens_echo_driver package:

cd ~/catkin_ws/src

Use either HTTPS:

git clone --recurse-submodules https://gitlab.com/toposens/public/ros-packages.git

or SSH:

git clone --recurse-submodules git@gitlab.com:toposens/public/ros-packages.git

Use rosdep to install missing dependencies:

rosdep update
rosdep install --from-paths ~/catkin_ws/src/ros-packages/ --ignore-src --rosdistro <distro> -y

Build the package by using catkin build:

catkin build toposens

This will build all packages that are included in the metapackage.

Source your ROS setup:

source devel/setup.bash

Tutorials

• Getting Started with the TS3

• Using Multiple TS3 Sensors

• Use a TS3 Sensor for Mapping with a TurtleBot3

• Getting Started with the TS3 on a Raspberry Pi

Code API

Doxygen results for all packages are stored on the ROS Docs server:

• toposens_msgs
• toposens_driver
• toposens_markers
• toposens_pointcloud
• toposens_sync

Get Involved

Contribute to this open source project by submitting feature requests, reporting bugs and extending the packages with your own ideas. Open up a topic on our issue tracker to start a discussion with the admins.

Note that this repository conforms to best practices adopted by the ROS community. Please check your contributions against these community guidelines to ensure uniformity across the codebase:

• Use Patterns and Best Practices
• Developer's Guide
• Coding Style Guide

Testing

TODO

Source Code Formatting

The code formatting style is based on Clang-Format Configuration. clang-format is a tool to automatically format C/C++/Objective-C code, so that developers don't need to worry about style issues while coding.

• Setup clang formatter:

  sudo apt install clang-format

To automatically format a file according to our desired coding standards, run

clang-format -style=file -i path/to/file

It should work on macOS/Linux. Clang-format version 6.0.0 is currently being used.