Boat Controller

The purpose of the boat controller is to get the boat from point A to point B on a local scale (~1km). We achieve this by adjusting sail and rudder angles.

The main controller code can be found in the python directory. The boat_controller_node subscribes to the /sensors topic and /desired_heading_degrees topic, and publishes to the /rudder_winch_actuation_angle topic. See this confluence page for more details.

How to run

1. Install ROS Melodic on a Ubuntu 18.04 (or similar). http://wiki.ros.org/ROS/Tutorials/InstallingandConfiguringROSEnvironment

2. Find the location that you want to create a ROS workspace (eg. cd ~)

3. Type the commands mkdir -p catkin_ws/src cd catkin_ws catkin_make.

4. Clone this repository in the src folder: cd src git clone https://github.com/UBCSailbot/boat_controller.git.

5. Clone the sailbot-msgs repository in the src folder: git clone https://github.com/UBCSailbot/sailbot-msg.git.

6. Go back to catkin_ws and build and source. cd .. catkin_make source devel/setup.bash.

Running boat_controller main loop

The easiest way to run boat_controller main loop is to first source ~/catkin_ws/devel/setup.bash before running other commands (you can put this in your ~/.bashrc file as well to do this automatically). Then rosrun boat_controller boat_controller_node.py ​

Running tests

To run the tests, navigate to the catkin_ws and run catkin_make run_tests. This command runs the tests associated with each package in your catkin workspace (i.e. if you have packages other than this one, the tests for those packages will run as well)

Contributing

Submit your additional code as a pull request. Include tests and add the relevant Jira task link in your commit's description. Use the unittest framework with rostest wrapper, and register your test to either integration.test or unit.test as applicable. See existing files in test folder for examples.

To ensure that the codebase stays clean, we will be using flake8 to enforce our style guide, which is mostly based off of pep8. To automate most of this process, you can use autopep8, which is a tool that automatically resolves most style issues. Example usage is shown below. Our team has agreed upon a 120 character line limit.

pip install flake8

pip install --upgrade autopep8

autopep8 --in-place --aggressive --max-line-length 120 --aggressive <path_to_file>

flake8 --statistics --max-line-length 120 <path_to_file>