Robotics 2020 - Università della Svizzera Italiana
Marco Ferri - Assignment 1
All the tasks have been implemented.
A working demo of the project can be find here: https://youtu.be/rWiowK1EY3U
For executing the program, you need a working ROS enviroinment on Ubuntu with TurtleSim installed. Then, it can be executed by building the catkin package with name usi_angry_turtle and running the following commands inside (different tabs of) the terminal:
roscore
rosrun turtlesim turtlesim_node
rosrun turtlesim turtle_teleop_key
rosrun usi_angry_turtle program.py
Remember to kill all the processes with CTRL+C when you have finished.
The program is built to handle a turtle called turtle_writer which normally writes USI on the screen and an arbitrary number of turtles called offenders, that randomly move inside the available space. The number of offenders can be controlled inside the main function of program.py by changing the parameter turtles_number (default is 10).
Please note that turtle1 is special, because it can also be teleoperated by using the terminal tab previously designated for it. Because of this, turtle1 is also the only offender which respawns once it get caught and killed. That is why the program never actually terminates and should be stopped manually at the end of the test.
Last but not least, it should be considered that while the writer chases an offender, it aims not directly for the offender's pose but instead tries to look ahead of some meters (as defined in the method UsiAngryTurtle.calculate_pose_ahead()). This causes the writer to get crazy sometimes, when some particular poses occurs for the offender it is chasing. However, this behaviour can be toggled off by acting on the proper parameter look_ahead inside the main function.