This tutorial will guide you through the procedure of docking your Leo Rover autonomously to the charging station.

Preparing the environment

To be able to perform the autonomous docking, you need to install two packages on your rover. One is responsible for detecting the board on the station and the other for moving the rover. You can get the first package by executing this command on your rover (connect to it through ssh):

The second package has to be built from source, so it requires a ROS workspace on your rover (if you don't have one or don't know whether there is already a workspace on your rover, you can follow this guide). To install the package, enter the src directory inside your workspace and execute these commands:

Launching the software

Now that everything is ready, we can proceed to launching some software. This whole section will describe in detail the functionalities provided in the leo_docking package and how to use them.

Here's a brief summary of different parts of the docking software we will run:

• Aruco Dectector – it's necessary for detecting the charging station; provides the docking process with needed coordinates.
• Docking state machine – once we have the position of the station, it will be used to set up the rover's position regarding the station and perform docking.
• Docking Client – the way of controlling the process of the docking (starting/aborting) and getting feedback from the autonomous docking.

The first two functions are provided through the launch file located under the launch directory. All parameters for the running nodes are loaded from the YAML files located under the config directory.

The client is run with rosrun command and takes three optional arguments, but it'll be covered later.

Detector + State Machine

As the state machine needs output from the detector, they are launched with one file. The detector provides the state machine with the station position in the base_link frame, and the state machine performs calculations and moves the rover based on the results. The machine has 3 main parts:

• Reaching docking area – the machine enters this part when the rover is not able to simple dock to the station from its starting position. The task of this part is to get the rover in front of the station in some distance, facing the station.
• Reaching docking point – this part is responsible for getting the rover right in front of the charging station where it'll be possible to make final corrections in the position before riding onto the station.
• Docking – the last part of the docking process that makes the rover dock at the station; makes the rover drive onto the station until one of three conditions are met: charging is detected, distance to the marker on the station has been reached or the wheels are blocked on the station – the rover reached the end of the station.

Here's a diagram that illustrates the state machine:

When it comes to the parameters, there are three files in the config directory:

Having everything covered, to run the detector with the state machine, simply run on the rover:

Docking Client

Having the software described above launched, we have the state machine ready for action, but it needs a signal to start the docking. That's where the Docking Client comes in. It's a script that sends an ID of the target charging station (the marker board on the station to be precise) to the state machine. Once the state machine gets the number, it starts the docking process. Here are all the functionalities that the docking client provides:

• Starting the docking process by sending a goal to the state machine actionlib server,
• Possibility of cancelling the docking with the ctrl+c key combination,
• Getting feedback from the state machine,
• Checking if the state machine is up or whether it stopped working during the docking process,
• Three optional command line arguments that are respectively: ID of the base, connection timeout, status check interval.

The command to run the client looks like this:

But as it was mentioned earlier, the arguments are optional, so a simple command to start the docking process is (in another terminal, with sourced workspace):

This will use the default values of the arguments ("1", "3", "2" respectively). Here is a customized example:

This command will result in the state machine trying to dock the rover to the station with ID "3", where the client will wait 2 seconds for getting connection with the state machine actionlib server and will check every 1.5 second if the server is still up.