Real-Time Simulation for Controlling the Mobility of an Unmanned Ground Vehicle Based on Robot Operating System

Robot Operating System (ROS) is a framework platform that runs on UNIX operating systems and enables more efficient operation and administration of different kinds of robots. The Jaguar 4 \(\,\times \,\) 4 Wheel Mobile Robot by Dr. Robot Inc. is one example of an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) that can be controlled using ROS. Dr. Robot Inc. has released a Windows-based software development kit (SDK) and open-source code to allow developers to develop this kind of robot. However, to manipulate this robot’s control and monitoring by ROS, a set of Linux command lines should be executed to launch the robot without the ability to use Dr. Robot’s SDK. Therefore, in order to benefit from the provided open-source code with ROS packages with Python and to avoid the need for running multiple Linux command lines, this paper presents a Python-based SDK and a real-time simulation for controlling and monitoring the movement of the Jaguar robot. The methodology technique that is considered in this paper is to analyze the open-source code to access all the robot’s sensor data and nodes using the proposed SDK, then simulate the hardware (the Jaguar Mobile Robot) with ROS Visualization (RViz) 3D software in real-time. The practical experiment is carried out by using a keyboard and a gamepad as controllers to achieve mobility control. The results show the robot’s position and orientation visualized by RViz, as well as its turn angle (theta), linear and angular velocities in a 2D space x-y plot. Using the RViz visualization tool and with the aid of the proposed SDK, it is straightforward to access and monitor all topics and nodes in real-time. Consequently, algorithms such as obstacle avoidance and object tracking could be readily tested and implemented in future works.