ARK Quick Reference

This page is meant to serve as a useful reference for working with the ARK. This is meant to be supplementary information only. Please consult the ARK guide and API manual for more information.

Startup

Run the following in seperate terminals

roslaunch husky_cpr_ark_navigation husky_ark_navigation.launch

rosservice call /ark_bridge/start_autonomy "req_data: {}"
google-chrome http://192.168.132.111:5000

Services

List maps

rosservice call /ark_bridge/map_data_list_maps "req_data: {}"

Load map

rosservice call /ark_bridge/map_data_load_map_from_disk "req_data:
  data: 'top-floor-robotics'"

Save map

Please be careful when saving a map. You can overwrite an existing map if you save a map with the same name (without warning).

If you edit a map in the web interface, you need to make sure that you save it using the ROS command line interface so it doesn’t get deleted. If you just save the map using the “Save” button in the web interface it will be erased if you click “New Map”. The only way to avoid overwriting the previous map is to use the ROS interface.

The map topic should always be /slam/map. You can name the file whatever you want. For instance, naming the file top-floor-robotics will save a map to /var/tmp/ros/top-floor-robotics.map

Please note you can’t interact with the map files directly (they are stored on the ARK computer and you can’t access them).

rosservice call /ark_bridge/map_data_save_map_to_disk "req_data:
  map_topic: '/slam/map'
  timeout:
    secs: 0
    nsecs: 0
  filename: 'top-floor-robotics'"

Delete maps

Deleting a map is permanent and irreversible, so please make sure you are deleting the correct map and that you really want to delete it.

rosservice call /ark_bridge/map_data_delete_map "req_data:
  data: ''"

Check the ARK is running

You can check it is running by running the following (in a new terminal):

rostopic echo /ark_bridge/clock_echo

You should see a new timestamp about every second.

Diagonistics

You can look at the status of the ARK with:

rosrun rqt_robot_monitor rqt_robot_monitor