Dolly the robot

It's a sheep, it's a dolly, it's a following robot. Born to be cloned.

Packages for launching Dolly demo, which uses ROS 2 and either Gazebo or Ignition.

Gazebo	Ignition

Versions

Dolly is known to work on the following systems.

Branch	ROS	Gazebo-classic	Ignition	OS
crystal	Crystal	Gazebo 9	❌	Ubuntu Bionic
dashing	Dashing	Gazebo 9	❌	Ubuntu Bionic, macOS Sierra
eloquent	Eloquent	Gazebo 9, Gazebo 11	Citadel	Ubuntu Bionic
foxy	Foxy	Gazebo 11	Citadel	Ubuntu Focal

Packages

This repository contains the following packages:

• dolly: Metapackage which provides all other packages.
• dolly_follow: Provides node with follow logic.
• dolly_gazebo: Robot model, simulation world and launch scripts for Gazebo-classic.
• dolly_ignition: Robot model, simulation world and launch scripts for Ignition.

Install

It's encouraged that you build Dolly from source, to learn about how to develop your own packages. But in case you just want to give it a quick try, there are binaries available too.

From binaries

Dolly has been released into several ROS distros:

ROS	Packages
Dashing	ros-dashing-dolly
	ros-dashing-dolly-follow
	ros-dashing-dolly-gazebo
Eloquent	ros-eloquent-dolly
	ros-eloquent-dolly-follow
	ros-eloquent-dolly-gazebo

From source

Install instructions for Ubuntu Bionic.

1. Install at least one simulator, Gazebo or Ignition

2. Install the appropriate ROS 2 version as instructed here.

3. Clone Dolly, choose the branch according to your ROS distro:

    mkdir -p ~/ws/src
    cd ~/ws/src
    git clone https://github.com/chapulina/dolly -b <distro>
   

4. Ignition only, for Eloquent and earlier, clone the bridge:

    git clone https://github.com/ignitionrobotics/ros_ign -b <distro>
   

5. Install dependencies:

    cd ~/ws
    rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src -r -y \
        --skip-keys=ignition-math6 \
        --skip-keys=ignition-msgs5 \
        --skip-keys=ignition-transport8 \
        --skip-keys=ignition-gazebo3
   

   Tip: On Ubuntu Focal, there's no need to skip keys.

6. Build and install:

    cd ~/ws
    colcon build
   

Run

Gazebo-classic

If you had Gazebo installed when compiling Dolly's packages, Gazebo support should be enabled.

1. Setup environment variables (the order is important):

    . /usr/share/gazebo/setup.sh
    . ~/ws/install/setup.bash
   

   Tip: If the command ros2 pkg list | grep dolly_gazebo comes up empty after setting up the environment, Gazebo support wasn't correctly setup.

2. Launch Dolly in a city (this will take some time to download models):

    ros2 launch dolly_gazebo dolly.launch.py world:=dolly_city.world
   

3. Launch Dolly in an empty world:

    ros2 launch dolly_gazebo dolly.launch.py world:=dolly_empty.world
   

Ignition

1. Setup environment variables:

    . ~/ws/install/setup.bash
   

   Tip: If the command ros2 pkg list | grep dolly_ignition comes up empty after setting up the environment, Ignition support wasn't correctly setup.

2. Launch Dolly in a station:

    ros2 launch dolly_ignition dolly.launch.py
   

Featured

• QConSF 2018
  • 🎥 Open Source Robotics: Hands on with Gazebo and ROS 2
  • ⌨️ Source code
• InfoQ
  • 📰 Open Source Robotics: Getting Started with Gazebo and ROS 2
• ROS Developers Live Class
  • 🎥 #70 How to Control a Robot with ROS2 (Dashing)
  • 🎥 #71 How to visualize sensor data in ROS2
• ROSConJP 2019
  • 🎥 これからのGazebo: ROSのシミュレーションの次世代
  • ⌨️ Source code
• ROS Developers Day 2020
  • 🎥 Hands-on with Ignition and ROS2