Start using ROS!

I would like to make a document of how I implement ROS framework on my robot. Everything I wrote here are working in progress, it's the way I do but not proven, which should be good enough as a guidance to get you up and running faster.

Let's start from what I have in hand.

Hardware

Robot platform : Pioneer3-AT

• My lab bought this guy without any on-board computer and additional sensors. It does come with low-level controller, called ARCOS, which later we will communicate with it vai RS-232 port. The robot also come with wheel encoder and basic PID velocity control, so at the end of the day we just send our desired speed to ARCOS to make it move.
• To communicate with ARCOS, Pioneer is shipped with open-source SDK called ARIA which provide an interface for controlling and receiving data from all Pioneers platform.

Software

• Because the robot didn't come with on-board computer, I will put a computer on top of it. The computer run the following software.
• Linux Ubuntu : Ubuntu 11.10 (32-bits) - Oneiric Ocelot. It's the latest Ubuntu version at the beginning of this project, at the time of writing this post there is version 12, but that's not matter anyways.
• ROS :  ROS Electric. We're going to learn a good deal about this ROS!