Lab Exercises and Practice Code Repo for F1/10 Autonomous Racing Course at the University of Virginia

Step 1)

Make sure to create a ROS workspace on your machine. Usually this can be done in the home directory. You can do this by typing the following coommands in the terminal, one at a time. If you already have a ROS workspace on your machine, you can skip directly to Step 2, and use your ROS workspace name instead of the name catkin_ws.

mkdir -p ~/catkin_ws/src
cd ~/catkin_ws/src
catkin_init_workspace
cd ..
catkin_make
source ~/catkin_ws/devel/setup.bash

Step 2)

Next it is recommended that you create a new directory in your home folder to clone this git repository.

mkdir ~/github
cd ~/github
git clone https://github.com/linklab-uva/f1tenth-course-labs.git

This will create a f1tenth-course-labs folder inside the github directory you just created.

This git repository, contains folders which are essentially ROS packages. For example, the repository contains a folder 'beginner_tutorials', which will contain its own subdirectories with the source code required for that package.

Step 3)

Next, you can either create a symbolic link between the package directory from the gihub folder to the package directory in the catkin_ws folder. Or you can simply copy the contents of the package to your package in the workspace folder.

To create a symbolic link between the folder of interest, e.g. beginner_tutorials and the src folder in your catkin workspace, use:

ln -s ~/github/f1tenth-course-labs/beginner_tutorials ~/catkin_ws/src/

To copy the contents of a package from the github folder to the corresponding folder in the catkin workspace use:

cp -a ~/github/f1tenth-course-labs/beginner_tutorials/. ~/catkin_ws/src/beginner_tutorials

Make sure all the python scripts are executable: Run:

cd ~/catkin_ws
find . -name “*.py” -exec chmod +x {} \;
catkin_make
source ~/catkin/devel/setup.bash

Thats it !, you should now be able to run any ROS command that interacts with packages.