Alpha-Bear-Omega-3 ($\alpha-$🐻 $-\Omega-\pi$)

$\alpha-$🐻 $-\Omega-\pi$ | The better-ish(?) quadruped robot | UdeS-GRO-68

Inspired by project QuadrUS, Boston Dynamics' Spot and MIT's mini cheetah, $\alpha-$🐻 $-\Omega-\pi$ is a quadruped robot bear made by six robotics engineering students from Université de Sherbrooke.

Original Contributors

From left to right:

Marc-Olivier Fecteau
Hubert Houle
Justine Landry
Jonathan Perron
Alex Jacques
Thomas-Xavier Guimont

A word from the authors

We could say that when we chose to make a quadruped robot from scratch in 12 weeks, we wanted to prove to ourselves that we could achieve anything by working together, but we really just wanted to make something cool, and when brainstorming, the idea of a robot bear came up. Why a bear? Because bears can't be intimidated by dogs; thenceforth, robot bears are inherently better.

Final product

Table of contents

• Development environment
  • Pre-requisites
  • Dependencies installation
  • Using the installation script
• Robot environment
  • System requirements
  • Packages
  • Setup SSH

Development environment

Pre-requisites

Operating system

• Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

Packages

N.B. The installation script installs most of the required packages. It is recommended to first run the script, and then install the missing dependencies.

• ROS Noetic
• Rviz: choose Desktop-Full Install option when installing ROS
• CHAMP | champ
• CHAMP | champ setup assistant
• Webots
• ROS Joy

Dependencies installation

• Go to ros-noetic installation page and install ros-noetic.

• Install all dependencies for kinematics:

sudo apt install python3-pip ros-noetic-joy ros-noetic-rosserial ros-noetic-rosserial-python ros-noetic-rosserial-arduino

• Install all depencies for control:

sudo apt install ros-noetic-ros-control ros-noetic-robot-state-publisher ros-noetic-control-msgs

Using the installation script

 N.B. Cloning the repository and using the installation script, a catkin workspace is initialized, so there's no need to do this procedure.

Choose the directory you want the project cloned into (~ by default):

cd ~/<path_to_directory>

Then, type:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/TeamdEnfer/Alpha-Bear-Omega-3.git

Then, go into the project repository, launch the install script, and choose what you want to install (all option is recommended for first install):

cd Alpha-Bear-Omega-3
source install.sh

Finally, go into the catkin workspace and build the ROS workspace:

cd control/ros_ws
catkin_make

The ROS environment should now be set up and ready to work with.

Project setup notes:

• Every time a non-.launch file is modified, do catkin_make in the ros_ws directory to update the executables.
• Every time a new terminal is opened, run the source ./install.sh script with option 6 to source the ROS setup files. Alternatively, add the command to the .bashrc file to automate the process.

Robot environment

System requirements

• RaspberryPi 4 (Tested with 8GB RAM)
• Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Tested with Server install)

 Authors note: though we recommend installing Ubuntu Server on the RPi 4, our experience with tha installation was "painful and full of adventures". Good luck!

RPi Packages

• ROS Noetic

Setup SSH

• Setup RPi as Wi-Fi access point

To access the RPi, type:

ssh <RPi_name>@<RPi_access_point>