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ROS Driver for E-Puck Robot based on ESP8266

A ros driver to control e-puck via wifi using esp-01 to bridge a serial communication.

This driver performs a distributed processing using ESP8266 @80Mhz to run the ros node using the rosserial protocol. Instead of using epuck BT, now it uses wifi which can perform a fast and robust communication (~90 hz of topic communication on ROS).

Authors

• Paulo Rezeck
• Maurício Ferrari

This driver is maintained by VERLAB/UFMG.

Overview

Basically, this...

Epuck on RViz

We implement a full robot description with wheel joints.

Hardware Modifications

In order to provide a epuck-esp8266 serial communication, we use a max23 chip to convert from RS232 (epuck) to TTL (esp8266) serial signal. Figure 1 shows the sketch.

Epuck firmware modifications

Instead of using native epuck Asercom, we decide to attach some minor modifications to provide a better interface with esp8266.

This new firmware is available in this repository and the user needs to burn it on epuck after start use the ros node. Naturally, it can be recorded with epuckuploadbt via Bluetooth, or via cable using MPLAB and a PIC recorder.

ESP8266 Firmware

How to use