Where I am now:
At the moment I've hand crafted s/w. It's broken up into two main parts - the lower level stuff (Running on a SH7032 chip) to control the robot's hardware and communicate with the host system, all reactive behaviours (avoid, escape et al). And the Host system higher level functions (Navigation, Path planning, Mapping etc). More info at http://toeminator.com/Toeminator/ToeminatorIndex.htm
Wants:
I'm looking to
experiment with the ROS, the point I'd like to get to is have a visual
UI of my robots environment, ideally using SLAM (I'm not sure what
modules there are for sonar data?) and replicate the host side of the
system. To that end I wondered if anyone could give me some starting
points. I've had a quick look at the tutorials and loaded the s/w onto
a virtual box.
I would guess my simplest starting point would be to develop something that would sit between the current server (Sends/receives data to/from the robot) and the ROS. Which is where I get somewhat lost. What do I need to develop? Is there a common ROS message format? What packages/modules should I be looking to use to get something tangible up and running? Is there a "Hello ROS" starting point I could usefully use. Or am I barking up the completely wrong tree?
Many Thanks
Mark