[ISO] TurtleBot Kinetic ISO - Beta Testers needed!

TurtleBot
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Hello TurtleBots & Developers,

After significant work refactoring our build systems for maintainability, we are pleased to announce that turtlebot-ros-kinetic-pre0.iso is now available for beta testing on x86_64.

Release Notes

Issues

The Intel RealSense driver does not build with 16.04.5 or later

Software

The ROS repository is pre-configured in apt and most commonly used ROS packages should be pre-installed.

Source-ry

The ROS environment is pre-configured
~/.config/bashrc.d/50_ros_kinetic runs source /opt/ros/kinetic/setup.bash

Hardware Loadout Management

ISO defaults to KHA1 Loadout in ~/.config/bashrc.d/70_turtlebot_loadout

  • Kobuki Mobile Base
  • Hexagonal Plate Stack
  • Orbec Astra 3D Camera
  • Laptop Battery /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1

Manufacturers will be able to have custom ISOs to install a loadout matching the equipped hardware. udev rules for these devices are preconfigured.

Note

Updates to 18.04 are currently disabled pending work on Melodic.

Help needed

Documentation

Please submit pull requests against turtlebot-doc

Missing Packages

Did we miss installing your favorite package?

32-bit support

Is this a priority for anyone?

UI/UX

How much effort should we spend adding things like the rqt tools to the launcher?
Should we prioritize Melodic / ROS2 support?

System startup refactoring

Prior to systemd we built a fairly robust startup system for upstart.
System bootup automation still needs to be refactored for launching

roslaunch turtlebot_bringup minimal.launch
roslaunch turtlebot_bringup 3dsensor.launch
  • We are planning to use an indicator like the volume control in the top right
    GUI to enable and disable startup
  • minimal + 3dsensor launched by default
    Enables RViz to display pointclouds after first boot without opening a terminal
  • ROS Startup
    As turtlebot user?
    As user ros?
    What happens If the initial user is not named turtlebot?

udev rules

ISO adds the user to group dialout
Can we stop setting 0666 permissions for devices?

Networking

On a previous episode we talked NetworkManager into helping to configure ROS networking. This needs to be updated and tested with Xenial. The current thinking is to move this into a pure python package, but depending on interest this work could be delayed to Melodic.

Bugs

Please file ISO bug reports here

Future Work

After a Kinetic release we hope to quickly produce a Melodic release followed by some sort of ROS2 release

Sponsor

The TurtleBot Kinetic ISO has been sponsored in part by Dabit Industries

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http://www.hxr.io/data/turtlebot-ros-kinetic-pre1.iso

It now ships with automatic startup and network auto-configuration


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Uploaded!

pre2
pre21366×768 136 KB

http://www.hxr.io/data/turtlebot-ros-kinetic-pre2.iso

This release includes a basic GUI for robot_systemd

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http://www.hxr.io/data/turtlebot-ros-kinetic-pre3.iso

Updated robot_indicator to support GUI for launching new systemd roslaunch units
Hoping for a release this week before starting on Melodic support.