ROS Driver of The Single Beam Sonar from BlueRobotics

bluerobotics-ping requires Python3. We create the ROS Noetic virtual environment in Conda so that this package can be used on Ubuntu 16.04/18.04 as well.

1. Install Miniconda: https://docs.conda.io/en/latest/miniconda.html
2. Follow https://github.com/RoboStack/ros-noetic to create a ROS Noetic virtual environment called ros
3. Create a catkin workspace if necessary

mkdir -p ~/sonar_ws/src

2. Clone this repo

cd ~/sonar_ws/src
git clone https://github.com/Weizhe-Chen/single_beam_sonar.git

3. Install ping-python to read the sonar data

conda activate ros
pip install bluerobotics-ping

4. Build the package

cd ~/sonar_ws/
catkin build
. devel/setup.bash

5. Launch the driver

roslaunch single_beam_sonar driver.launch

6. Check the published data

rqt_console

7. Alternatively, we can run the node directly rather than doing step 5 and 6

# In another terminal
roscore
# In the terminal with conda virtualenv and ~/sonar_ws/devel/setup.sh sourced
rosrun single_beam_sonar driver.py

8. Check rostopic

   rostopic info /sonar
   rostopic echo /sonar

   

9. (Optional) I've added the following lines in the ~/.bashrc file of the on-board computer to activate the Noetic virtual environment and catkin workspace whenever we open a terminal

   # vim ~/.bashrc
   conda activate ros
   source ~/sonar_ws/devel/setup.bash