Skip to content

Competition Launch Scripts; Configuration, Setup and Running them

Competition Launch Scripts: Configuration, Setup and Running them

This guide assumes that you are running on some distribution of Ubuntu, preferrably Ubuntu 22.04. It should work in either WSL or a native Linux install. And have the FT-FSAI2x stack, EUFS simulator and gazebo installed. There is a guide on how to do that here.

What are the Competition Launch Scripts?

These can be found in ft_system/src/launch We run this script on the car, but can be used in simulation (instead of system_sim.launch.py )as well.

  • autocross.launch.py
  • acceleration.launch.simulation.py

How to run the Competition Launch Scripts in simulation

Setting up the environment

Before running, check that you have the FT_CATKIN_HOME environment variable set (this is needed for perception and some ROS1 Packages)

You can use this to list your environment variables and what they are set to: 

env
If it is not set, you can set it using the following command to set it to ~/catkin_ws or your FT Workspace (this should be set up on the FTA pc):

export FT_CATKIN_HOME=$HOME/catkin_ws    #replace catkin_ws with your FT workspace if it does not exist
or if you want it to be permanently set : 
echo 'export FT_CATKIN_HOME=$HOME/catkin_ws' >> ~/.bashrc  #replace catkin_ws with your FT workspace if it does not exist
source ~/.bashrc

Launching

Then, you can run the launch script using the following commands in your FT Workspace:

Make sure you source on every terminal/terminal tab you use: 

. install/setup.sh  #(or any alias you might have set up for this, most people have it set to .w or .r)

Compile all of our code along with the simulator code. You can do this with the following command.

colcon build --symlink-install

To launch EUFS Simulator: 

ros2 launch eufs_launcher eufs_launcher.launch.py

in another terminal tab, To run the FT Stack launch script: 

ros2 launch ft_system autocross.launch.py simulation:=yes