Results tagged “nao”

Armin Hornung from Albert-Ludwigs-Universität has announced version 0.2 of the nao stack:

Version 0.2 of Freiburg's "nao" stack for Aldebaran's Nao humanoid has just been released. Major changes are the compatibility with NaoQI version 1.6 and the new omnidirectional walking engine (detailed changelist: http://www.ros.org/wiki/nao/ChangeList ).

Files are available packaged at:
http://code.google.com/p/alufr-ros-pkg/downloads/list

or via source checkout from Freiburg's ROS repository:
http://alufr-ros-pkg.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/nao/

The stack documentation at http://www.ros.org/wiki/nao was extended and adjusted to this new version.

I'm open for feedback and suggestions!

Cheers,
Armin

From Armin Hornung at University of Freiburg:

Version 0.11 of Freiburg's "nao" stack has just been released, providing a few minor fixes for v0.1. Files are available packaged at:
http://code.google.com/p/alufr-ros-pkg/downloads/list

or via source checkout from:
https://alufr-ros-pkg.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/nao

All code is fully compatible with ROS 1.0. On the robot side, this will probably be the last release compatible with the NaoQI API 1.3.17, as the new version 1.6.0 became available recently.

Additionally, extended documentation for all nodes in the stack is now available at http://www.ros.org/wiki/nao/.

Best regards,
Armin

The Aldebaran Nao is a commercially available, 60cm tall, humanoid robot targeted at research lab and classrooms. The Nao is small, but it packs a lot into its tiny frame: four microphones, two VGA cameras, touch sensors on the head, infrared sensors, and more. The use of Nao with ROS has demonstrated how quickly open-source code can enable a community to come together around a common hardware platform.

The first Nao driver for ROS was released by Brown University's RLAB in November of 2009. This initial release included head control, text-to-speech, basic navigation, and access to the forehead camera. Just a couple of days later, the University of Freiburg's Humanoid Robot Lab used Brown's Nao driver to develop new capabilities, including torso odometry and joystick-based tele-operation. Development didn't stop there: in December, the Humanoid Robot Lab put together a complete ROS stack for the Nao that added IMU state, a URDF robot model, visualization of the robot state in rviz, and more.

The Nao SDK already comes with built-in support for the open-source OpenCV library. It will be exciting to see what additional capabilities the Nao will gain now that it can be connected to the hundreds of different ROS packages that are freely available.

Brown is also using open source and ROS as part of their research process:

Publishing our ROS code as well as research papers is now an integral part of disseminating our work. ROS provides the best means forward for enabling robotics researchers to share their results and more rapidly advance the state-of-the-art.

-- Chad Jenkins, Professor, Brown University

The University of Freiburg's Nao stack is available on alufr-ros-pkg. Brown's Nao drivers are available on brown-ros-pkg, along with drivers for the iRobot Create and a Gstream-based webcam driver.

Update: Documentation is available on ros.org at http://www.ros.org/wiki/alufr-ros-pkg

I'm happy to announce v0.1, the first proper release of Freiburg's Nao Stack located at: http://code.google.com/p/alufr-ros-pkg/

You can check out the trunk (svn) from:
http://alufr-ros-pkg.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/

or download the stack package from:
http://code.google.com/p/alufr-ros-pkg/downloads/list

Changes are:

• improved torso odometry
• nao_ctrl now also transmits the state of Nao's onboard IMU
• new nao_description package makes Nao's complete joint state, transformations and visualization available through robot_state_publisher
• launch files for convenient start up
  

Some basic instructions are available at http://code.google.com/p/alufr-ros-pkg/, but I might also move them to ros.org if that's the more appropriate place. I would be happy to hear if all is working for you (or not), or how to make things more ROS-compliant.

Best regards, Armin

navigation 0.6.0 has just been released. This release makes the recovery behaviors the navigation stack invokes when planning fails plugin based. This means that users of the move_base node now have the flexibility to write recovery behaviors that are appropriate for their robot. Documentation on how to configure the navigation stack to use these plugins can be found here, and two example recovery behaviors can be found here and here. These changes are all backwards compatible, so if you've been satisfied with the default recovery behaviors, they'll contiunue to work as they have in the past.

Full Changelist

New Features

• move_base: Made the recovery behaviors that the navigation stack uses plugins so that users of the move_base node have more flexibility in how the robot behaves when planning fails. All the changes to the navigation stack are backwards compatible.
• clear_costmap_recovery: Added this recovery behavior as a default plugin for the move_base node. Also, this package was API and Doc reviewed.
• rotate_recovery: Added this recovery behavior as a default plugin for the move_base node. Also, this package was API and Doc reviewed.
• nav_core: Added a !RecoveryBehavior interface and updated documentation accordingly.
• voxel_grid: Added a few more tests for the voxel_grid package.

Bug Fixes

• costmap_2d: Fixed build failure on Karmic/gcc4.4

Download

• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/navigation/navigation-0.6.0.tar.bz2

Fast on the heels of the Brown Nao driver, Armin Hornung of Albert-Ludwigs-Unversität Freiburg has announced joy-package compatibility and torso odometry additions for the Nao driver -- as well as the alufr-ros-pkg repository. Armin's announcement is below.

Based on the recently announced Nao driver by Brown University, there is now a regular joystick teleoperation node available. It operates Nao using messages from the "joy" topic, so it should work with any gamepad or joystick in ROS. In addition, the control node running on Nao returns some basic torso odometry estimate. The code is available at http://code.google.com/p/alufr-ros-pkg/ to checkout via SVN. A README with more details can be found in the "nao" stack there.

I'm open for feedback and suggestions!

-- Armin

Brown University has been hard at work on a developing an Aldebaran Nao driver for ROS and recently announced an open source (GPL) version to the community. The text of Trevor Jay's announcement is below.

Brown University is pleased to release a ROS driver for the Aldebaran Nao. The driver makes available: head control, text-to-speech, basic navigation, and (most interestingly) the Nao's forehead camera. Sample clients are part of the download, including a WiiMote teleop client.

Here are two videos of the driver in action (one from the robot's perspective):

The driver is available at the brown-ros-pkg download page.

If you have any problems or just find the driver useful, please let us know! We will add features as our work and the community need them.

_Trevor