Offline Development and Troubleshooting

In the last section, we briefly introduced the use of rosbags for recording your test runs for later evaluation and troubleshooting. This is a very crucial step, hence, as a starter, we have prepared sample rosbags for you to explore.

1. Download the ROS bags

  • Use this Google Drive link to download the ROS bags.

    • NOTE: The files are large with a total size of ~370MB.

  • Save the file on your computer and take note of the directory (it doesn't matter where you store it). For this tutorial, we will use <rosbag-location>.

2. Run the ROS bags
  • First, open a new terminal and start up roscore:
roscore
  • In another terminal, open up rviz
rosrun rviz rviz -d $(rospack find turtlebot3_parc)/rviz/turtlebot3_parc.rviz
  • Finally, in another terminal, run the rosbag play command and pass the ros bag you want to play:
# navigate to the <rosbag-location> directory and then run the command:
rosbag play task-part1.bag

task overview

We strongly recommend that you play around with the three rosbags and observe the data carefully to explore best ways to complete the task.

3. Create your own ROS bags

The last task is for you to create rosbags of your own from your team test sessions. For this, start by checking out the link for the official documentation on rosbags.

As state in the previous section, give it a try follow the instructions below:

# in a new terminal on the host PC, run:
rosbag record -a # this is to record all the topics. This might lead to a very large *.bag file

# check out other rosbag commands such as "play", "compress", etc.

Follow this link for a video tutorial.