Welcome to Interbotix Discussions!

[lukeschmitt-tr]

👋 Hey everyone!

We're going to be using GitHub's Discussions feature as a way to connect with our community. Feel free to ask any questions, share ideas, show off cool applications of our robots, and just be welcoming and kind to others.

Note that this is for asking questions. If you are having problems with any of your robots, please open an issue in the repo for your robot type:

• Manipulators
• Rovers
• Crawlers
• Turret & Pan/Tilt Mechanisms

If you care to, comment below with a brief introduction of yourself and what you do with our robots!

-- Luke

[drpjm]

Howdy! We are using two Locobots in our lab at VCU to explore human robot interaction and mobile manipulation.

[lukeschmitt-tr]

Great to hear that you're using them for such interesting applications! You're welcome to share links to any papers you've published with the help of our robots.

[drpjm]

Will do!

Since we are moving past the "get to know the locobot" stage, do you have any recommendations on how to structure new ros-based stacks on top of the locobot stack? I was thinking of making a new repo that I clone into my robot's and laptop's interbotix_ws.

Also, do you have recommendations on updating the locobot support code besides going into each repo and git-pulling?

[lukeschmitt-tr]

There is no officially recommended way - just do whatever works best for you. Your method is perfectly acceptable. Being able to separate out your own git repo from the main Interbotix packages is pretty useful.

Something that I've found works well is VSCode's ability to handle remote development via ssh. Just add the LoCoBot as a host, ssh into your workspace directory through VSCode, and program like you would normally.

Pulling changes into the repo is the only method we recommend right now, though creating releases and publishing to the ROS build farm is something that we're looking into.

Edit:
We have added a guide on remote development here.

[drpjm]

Thanks for the tips! To help our workflow, we created a script that rolls through the Interbotix repos and updates them.