After having some trouble with our Raspberry Pi 3 Model 3+, we finally got it up and running Ubuntu MATE. Subsequently, we also got it running ROS Melodic Melodia, which is the latest release of ROS primarily targeted at Ubuntu. We installed and got the rtabmap_ros package running as well, but as we do not have a camera yet we had to use one of their example bags. We’re happy to finally have the software running, and are planning to use the example bag while familiarizing ourselves with rtabmap.
To make the robot do what we’re intending it to do we’ll be making our own node that will be communicating with rtabmap’s nodes through the ROS nodes. Nodes can be of different programming languages, with full support for languages such as C++ and Python, but we’ll be using C++ for our nodes because that’s what our group is overall most familiar with.
We had some power problems with the raspberry pi 3 B+ because it requires 2.5A instead of the normal 1A raspberry pi 1 required. Therefore we had to beef up our power supply for our car so it could run the raspberry.
We will also try to make some cases for our components using Solid works or maybe more lego Mindstorms. We need to ensure that our components sit tightly in the whole operation.