ESP32 ROS Companion

Tutorial on making an ESP32 ROS Companion, that uses serial communication to read values from an isolated computer and sends to the ROS network via wifi for a ROS enabled computer to get access.

Software setup and requirements

• ROS Noetic
• ESP32 Arduino framework
• rosserial package
• ros_lib Arduino library
• python for serial communication (or anything that talks via serial)

Hardware setup

• Computer as ROS Master
• Isolated computer
• ESP32 dev board and USB cable
• Wi-Fi router

Use case

The code provided in this repo can be used to test a simple application. The objective is to iteratively read a 6DOF pose data on a Python code, sending it through serial and then encapsulating it as a PoseStamped message to a topic in the ROS network via Wi-Fi. The following chart shows the flow of data in a sample case of 3 computers in a ROS network.

flowchart TD;
    A[Isolated 
    Computer] -->|Serial| B(ESP32);
    B --> |Wi-Fi|C{Router};
    C <-->|Wi-Fi| D[ROS computer A];
    C <-->|Wi-Fi| E[ROS computer B];
    C <-->|Wi-Fi| F[ROS computer C];

Loading

On the isolated computer

python3 send_serial_esp32.py

On the ROS computer

roscore

rosrun rosserial_python serial_node.py tcp

On the ESP32

Compile and upload the project serial2roswifi.