Network setup

Our Q.bo is configured for wired or wireless network access. Wired access is via the lab network and the robot's name. Wireless access is via the hidden robots wireless network. Contact rjw57 or SigProC CO for more details on joining the network.

Routing

Packets are routed between the wireless network and the lab wired network only. If the robot is only on the wireless connection, it can talk to machines in the lab but not the wider world. The robot must be physically plugged into the network to access the Internet.

Similarly, if your machine is only on the wireless network, it will not be able to talk to machines outside of the lab. This means no Google. It is strongly recommended that you connect your machine via the wired network and use the wireless network only when driving the robot around.

Machines on the wired network have different host names and IPs than machines on the wireless network. If your machine is both plugged into the wired network and on the wireless, it will have two names: one for the wired and one for the wireless. The wireless name will probably be of the form sigproc-robot-laptopX where X is some number.

Make sure you use the correct names for the correct network. Specifically, if you're talking to the robot, you need to make sure that the ROS_MASTER_URI environment variable and the qbo_address launch parameter are correctly set for the network you're using. See the page on initial setup for the script which rjw57 uses.

Wired operation

Plugging the robot into the lab network should result in it getting a connection automatically via DHCP. Your machine should also get an IP address DHCP-ed. Contact rjw57 or SigProC CO for information about adding your machine to the network.

Wireless operation

You will need to join the robot network. (Again, contact rjw57 or SigProC CO for information on this.) The robot network does not route externally and so you'll need to use a wired connection on your machine for accessing the Internet and the wireless to access the robot network.

##Running roscore on the robot

If you are experiencing high latencies even when you are running your nodes on the Qbo, you could try to run roscore on the robot (all of the publisher-subscriber wiring will be sorted on the robot instead). You can do this by SSHing into the robot and typing:

$ roscore

Now disconnect from the robot (ctrl+d). Set your ROS_MASTER_URI to correspond to the robot.

$ export ROS_MASTER_URI="http://robotaddress:11311"

When you launch your launch files and nodes, subscribers and publishers will be wired together on the qbo, rather than your local machine. If you run your nodes on the qbo, this will greatly ameliorate latency issues.