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The TurtleBot Panorama Demo

Panorama Demo

The panorama demo will show you how to take impressive (to some extent) panoramic pictures with your TurtleBot. To do it turtlebot_panorama uses pano_ros for taking snapshots and stitching them together to create panorama pictures.

Getting started

To launch this app, ssh (ssh help) (ssh help) into the TurtleBot and start the panorama demo:

• To ssh in to a TurtleBot from a workstation computer:

  • determine the IP_OF_TURTLEBOT by using ifconfig (Need more help) (Need more help)

    To determine a computer's IP address and network interface in linux:

    • ifconfig

    You will see something like:

    • lo        Link encap:Local Loopback  
                inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
                inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
                UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:16436  Metric:1
                RX packets:6658055 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
                TX packets:6658055 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
                collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 
                RX bytes:587372914 (587.3 MB)  TX bytes:587372914 (587.3 MB)
      
      wlan1     Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 48:5d:60:75:58:90  
                inet addr:10.0.129.17  Bcast:10.0.129.255  Mask:255.255.254.0
                inet6 addr: fe80::4a5d:60ff:fe75:5890/64 Scope:Link
                UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
                RX packets:101983 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
                TX packets:37244 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
                collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
                RX bytes:49326141 (49.3 MB)  TX bytes:7588044 (7.5 MB)

    • the network interface for the wireless card is wlan1

    • the IP address of the computer is 10.0.129.17

    
    

  • use ssh to connect to the TurtleBot

    ssh turtlebot@IP_OF_TURTLEBOT

  
  

  roslaunch turtlebot_panorama panorama.launch

The panorama app offers two interfaces for triggering the panorama creation:

1. Via rostopic using parameters defined in the launch file (see Parameters)

   $ rostopic pub turtlebot_panorama/take_pano std_msgs/Empty

2. Via a service with user-specified parameters (see TakePano service definition)

   $ rosservice call turtlebot_panorama/take_pano 0 360.0 30.0 0.3

You can also stop the panorama creation:

1. Via rostopic

   $ rostopic pub turtlebot_panorama/stop_pano std_msgs/Empty

2. Via a service call with the mode parameter set to STOP (2)

   $ rosservice call turtlebot_panorama/take_pano 2 360.0 30.0 0.3

Once you stop the creation a panorama image is created with the already gather snapshots.

Panorama parameters

The magic number you show in previous service calls tell the application how take the panorama. We explain here in the order they must me added to service calls:

• mode for taking the pictures. Can be:

  • 0 for snap&rotate (i.e. rotate, stop, snapshot, rotate, stop, snapshot, ...)

  • 1 for continuous (i.e. keep rotating while taking snapshots)
  • 2 to stop an ongoing panorama creation
• total angle of panorama picture, in degrees

• angle interval (in degrees) when creating the panorama picture in snap&rotate mode, time interval (in seconds) otherwise

• rotating velocity (in radians/s)

Checking Result

The result of panorama can be shown via image_view.

 > rosrun image_view image_view image:=/turtlebot_panorama/panorama

What Next?

• Controlling the Turtlebot with an Android device or return to TurtleBot main page.