General Procedure for Running Demos

In general, any duckietown repository that has been built from one of the templates.

In some cases, you may have an option to run the actual demo code on your laptop and communicate with the robot, or to directly run the code on the robot.

Tip

In most cases, you should try to run the code natively on the robot since this will be more reproducible. When you run the code on your laptop you will be connecting to the robot through a wireless network which will induce a random latency and can cause unexpected or poor performance

In either case the first step will be to build the project image. To do so, enter the the repository containing the project code and run:

dts devel build -H [!ROBOTNAME]

Note

To build the project on the laptop if you intend to run it from the laptop you can exclude the -H [!ROBOTNAME] - the default behaviour is to build the project on the machine where the dts build command is being run

Note

In some cases you may be able to skip the project building step if an image has already been pushed to the Docker registry. This should be specified inside the demo instructions. In this case, when you run the demo (next step) the image will be pulled from the registry, which can take some time.

Then you can run the demo with the command

dts devel run -H [!ROBOTNAME] -L [!LAUNCHER_NAME]

Again, this will run the code on the robot. If you would like to run the code on laptop you can switch the -H, which specifies the machine to run the code on, with a -R, which specifies which robot to connect to.

Tip

When you do dts devel run the code from your laptop will be copied to the robot with a command called rsync. This uses the same protocal as (SSH)[secure-shell]. As a result it will ask you for a password, which can get a annoying. It is recommended to avoid this by copying your SSH credentials to the robot with:

ssh-copy-id duckie@ROBOT_NAME.local

you will have ente your password to complete this but then you should never be asked for your password again.

You may want to look at more of the details of the dts devel API for more advanced features.