BuggyROS (High Level Software) Getting Started

So you want to write an autonomous buggy....

This page presents three topics; WHAT BuggyROS is, a bit of WHY BuggyROS is how it is, and HOW to use this knowledge to write something useful.

To write an Autonomous robot, you need to write multiple genres of software.

One is robotics software. Robotics software is theoretical and algorithmic in nature, but rather than being interested in the fastest ways to sort a list or the cost of rebalancing a tree in the worst case, it is interested in transforming measurements in coordinate frames, or using measurements of multiple sensors to yield a composite measurement better than any one.

Another is systems software. Systems software is written as a platform to be used by other programmers, in our case, the ones who write robotics software. System software deals with the harsh realities of computing; that data has to be operated on by different pieces of Robotics code, that operations can fail, and that we live in a world where every device has 2 or more cores. BuggyROS is systems code.

The last is embedded software. Embedded software interfaces with sensors and actuators that sense and act on the physical world, and read and acts on messages from higher level software or other embedded components.

It is possible to write all of these sorts of softwares at the same time, but it is not efficient for the programmer.

WHAT BuggyROS Is

BuggyROS is a message-passing system whose goal is