Setting up the ISSPA environment

The first step to interact with ISSPA, is to learn how to use the ISSPA source code and how PA (Pyhsical Agents) are launched! Specifically, we will guide you on how to setup your system with respect to the following topics:

Developing Environment

We recommend using Ubuntu 20.04 as your operating system for development, since it is the last version that supports ROS1 noetic, the version of the Robot Operating System we use at the moment; we will upgrade to ROS2 in future.

From now on, we assume you have already installed these components in your machine:

The following are some of the dependency libraries that you need to install before ISSPA can be compiled and run:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install libuvc-dev libgoogle-glog-dev ros-noetic-costmap-2d ros-noetic-nav-core libceres-dev

You might also need to install git to clone the ISSPA repository:

sudo apt install git

WorkSpace Setup

ISSPA is our main repository; it is recommended that you first understand its directory structure, which is necessary for later use and development.

Link to the ISSPA GitHub Repository

First, open a terminal and clone the source code inside your preferred directory; we just use your user home directory /home/$USER/ as an example:

cd /home/$USER
git clone https://github.com/chenhengwei1999/ISSPA.git

Make sure that ROS noetic environment is correctly loaded before proceeding with the following steps. This can be done just for the current terminal session by means of the command

source /opt/ros/noetic/setup.bash

Add this command to your ~/.bashrc file to automatically load ROS noetic in each terminal session.

Next, use the command catkin_make to compile the workspace.

cd /home/$USER/ISSPA
catkin_make

Warm reminder:

Please remember to refresh the environment variables before using the program. Alternatively, storing them in ~/.bashrc is fine.

cd /home/$USER/ISSPA
source devel/setup.bash
# echo "source ~/ISSPA/devel/setup.bash" >> ~/.bashrc

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