ROS Programming: Building Powerful Robots

Teleoperating ROS Turtle using a keyboard

This section is for beginners who haven't worked with teleoperation in ROS yet. In this section, we will see how to teleoperate a robot manually using a keyboard. Using a keyboard, we can translate and rotate the robot. One of the basic example to demonstrate keyboard teleoperation is ROS turtlesim.

The following commands launch turtlesim with keyboard teleoperation. You can run each command on separate Terminals.

Run roscore:

    $ roscore

Run a turtlesim node using the following command. This command will launch the turtlesim window:

    $ rosrun turtlesim turtlesim_node

Run the keyboard teleoperation node. We can change the turtle's position by pressing arrow keys on the keyboard:

    $ rosrun turtlesim ...