Introducing the TekiControl project: Using ROS from C#

Abstract

Our faculty has recently managed to buy a Turtlebot 2 robot. The final aim of the project is to develop a low-cost home support robot that will be capable of executing simple tasks, such as locating and fetching known objects while avoiding obstacles that can be found in a typical home environment. This paper is about our first steps in the TekiControl project: it describes the basic principles and the usage of the ROS framework, along with the possible approaches of using it from an officially not-supported programming language, namely the C#. The usage of the chosen alternative (UML ROS.NET) is described in details, after which the module plan and the operating principle of the developed controller interface for our Teki robot is introduced. As a result, we now have a working central message hub that can be used as a preprocessor in ROS environments to support messages with shared memory references for .NET applications.