LASR Base

LASR Base is the core ROS codebase maintained by the King College London's LASR@Home team at the Sensible Robots Research Lab.

Structure

The packages in this repository are organized into distinct layers to separate infrastructure, reusable behaviors, and high-level task execution:

Folder	Sub-package	Description
common/	helpers	Common Python and ROS helper utilities and services.
	interfaces	Web-based and touch user interfaces for robot control/monitoring.
	language	LLM inference services for information extraction.
	manipulation	Grasping and motion control developed for the TIAGo gripper.
	navigation	Augmentations, planners, and controllers for mobile navigation.
	simulation	Gazebo simulation environments for testing and development.
	speech	Whisper based speach recognition and Speech-To-Text (STT).
	vision	YOLO based services for object detection, segmentation, keypoint estimation and so on.
documentation/	—	General documenation and Guides.
skills/	—	Fully modular states and state machines providing sub-behaviors (e.g., detection, speak, follow person).
tasks/	—	Full task-level implementations for RoboCup@Home Tasks and complex scenarios.

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*sub-packages contain multiple additional packages

Quick Start

Prerequisites

• Ubuntu 24 OS (a dedicated partition or device is recommended - however if not possible you can use a Virtual Machine such as VirutalBox for Mac or WSL for Windows)
• ROS 2 Humble Legacy ROS 1 Noetic codebase can be found in the ros1 branch
• Python 3.x
• Apptainer required for development on the codebase.

Apptainer Container

1. Setup

1. Ensure you are in the root directory

2. Download tiago_humble_os.sif into the root directory (contact a team member/ Dr. Gerard Canal for access)

3. Build the container:

   apptainer build ros2.sif ros2.def

2. Running the Container

apptainer run -B /run/user/$UID ros2.sif

(Use --nv if an NVIDIA GPU is available and you are on Ubuntu 22)

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Building the Workspace

1. Clone this repository into your ROS workspace source directory:

 cd ~/ros_ws/src
 git clone https://github.com/LASR-at-Home/Base.git

2. Build and source the workspace

cd ~/ros_ws/
colcon build
source install/setup.bash

3. Run the package
   (Individual packages can be launched directly through a launch file or executable. Refer to the package's README.md for further information.)

External Resources and References

Core Software and external Packages

• PAL Robotics - TIAGo
• Locus Robotics - ament_virtualenv
• Box Robotics. - ros2 numpy
• ULE Robotics Group - YASMIN