ARan

ROS Software Maintainer: PAL Robotics

ARan is the mobile base designed for you. Obtain 3D environment perception and richer data collection with the robot’s wide 245º Field of View (FoV) LiDAR and two RGB-D cameras. Unleash high performance computing and AI research using ARan’s NVIDIA Jetson GPU add-on. Move payloads of up to 80kg with excellent balance in indoor environments, including with harsh conditions and wet grounds, thanks to the built-in insulation and improved suspension system. Enjoy the easy-to-use visual programming and advanced navigation suite to collaborate with people and deploy the robot right away.

If you wish to know more or request a quote, please send us a message or refer to the product page

Contents

ARan

Tutorials

A comprehensive set of tutorials are now available for the ARan robot in Robots/ARan-base/Tutorials. The tutorials make use of the Gazebo simulator and currently contain tutorials on autonomous navigation. Comprehensive instructions on how to install the public simulator are provided.

Public simulation packages overview

This section presents an overview of the packages used in the public simulation of ARan, with links to the corresponding wiki pages describing the packages. For the installation instructions of the packages please refer to ARan simulation installation tutorial.

Control the robot

ARan supports a logitech joystick by default.

Controllers from other vendors may have different key mappings. In this case the joy_teleop.yaml file needs to be changed to reflect the different configuration.

If you had one plugged in when you started up the (real or simulated) robot, now it can be used. Activate the joystick commands by pressing the 'X' button, and drive using the controllers. This activation behaviour comes in very handy when the robot is navigating autonomously but a rapid interruption is needed.

One can also use the rqt_robot_steering plugin to drive the robot by sending commands directly to /mobile_base_controller/cmd_vel

Library Overview

1. Basic Configuration

Component	ROS package/stack
Robot model (URDF)	pmb3_description
Robot controller configuration	pmb3_controller_configuration
Robot bringup files	pmb3_bringup

2. Hardware Drivers and Simulation

Component	ROS package/stack
Simulation-specifig controller config	pmb3_controller_configuration_gazebo
Gazebo setup	pmb3_gazebo
Navigation stack	pmb3_navigation

3. High-Level Capabilities

Component	ROS package/stack
Control over the source of movement commands	twist_mux
Joystick teleoperation interface	joy_teleop

Related Repositories

PAL Robotics GitHub organization