connect to physical turtlebot without usb

Dear all,

I woudl like to use the turtlebot hardware package, and I am wondering wheter it is possible to

connect to the turtle bot robot without using a notebook, this is, just connecting somehow since matlab

to the turtle bot. In other words, in order to use the turlte bot hardware support package, is it

mandatory to have a notebook connected to the turtlebot?

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

The notebook or equivalent runs the control software. You would have install a wifi or Bluetooth interface in place of the netbook (and possibly some other hardware as well, I do not know.) Then your MATLAB session would have to supply all of the controlling commands, every signal to turn the wheel and so on. It would probably be possible but not through the hardware package that you mentioned.

[Walter Roberson]

You could get on of the turtlebot emulator programs to run on your machine, and modify it so that instead of just acting on commands in software, that it sent out every command to to the actual device, and then you could use the hardware package to talk to the emulator... but this would be a nuisance to do.

[Ignacio Arriscado]

sorry, I dont understand what you mean. Could you please explain in another way?

[Walter Roberson]

If it is very important to use the Turtlebot Hardware Support Package that you mention, then you can use the Gazebo software emulator to emulate a Turtlebot https://www.mathworks.com/help/robotics/examples/get-started-with-gazebo-and-a-simulated-turtlebot.html and the hardware support package will be happy to talk to that softare package that is emulating a Turtlebot . The hardware support package use TCP or UDP to communicate with a turtlebot, so anything that responds as if it were a turtlebot is fine for the hardware support package.

This takes the problem from having to program the complete support for the turtlebot in MATLAB, to changing the Gazebo software emulator package to be able to communicate with the real turtlebot that you have removed the netbook from. Gazebo is probably written in C++ . I have never looked at the software so I have no idea how difficult it would be to adapt the software.

It would be sort of like if instead of directly controlling a moisture vaporator through its binary language, you installed a software package on your PC that emulated C3P0 and then hacked the emulated C3P0 program so that your MATLAB could talk to it and it would control a LEGO C3P0 to talk to the moisture vaporator for you. It could be done, but whether it is worth it is a different question.