This ROS package contains a PyQt GUI (see screenshot below) whose job is to publish the GameState message, which all robot soccer teams (and the soccersim Gazebo simulator) will consume.

Inspired by the Chicken McThuggets Command Center.

Dependencies:

The Referee uses PyQt4 to render the GUI. Because of this, you must install this dependency. On Linux:

$ sudo apt-get install python-qt4

See the wiki for an understanding of how and in which settings to use the different functional schemes of the Robot Soccer Referee.

The message definition contains the following:

int32 home_score            # score of the home/away team
int32 away_score            #
int32 home_bot_count        # how many robots will the home/away team be playing with?
int32 away_bot_count        # 
int32 remaining_seconds     # how many more seconds are remaining in this half?
bool play                   # Play/Pause -- robots should freeze in place when false
bool reset_field            # Robots should go to their home positions and freeze while true
bool home_penalty           # If reset_field is true and my team (home/away) receives a penalty,
bool away_penalty           #   then this will be true and my team should reset to penalty mode
bool second_half            # Second half of match. Robots should switch sides.

To access the GameState message in your own ROS package, you must add this package to your catkin_ws workspace folder. This will also allow you to run the soccerref on your own during testing (see below).

Start by cloning this repo into your catkin_ws/src directory. It is best to git clone the code so that as changes are released you can simply git pull to update.

$ cd catkin_ws/src
$ git clone https://github.com/embeddedprogrammer/soccerref.git

Your catkin_ws/src directory should look like:

catkin_ws/
  src/
    soccerref
    your_team_package/
      CMakeLists.txt
      package.xml

Next, you will want to edit your team's CMakeLists.txt and package.xml so that catkin knows that your package depends on soccerref:

# CMakeLists.txt

find_package(catkin REQUIRED COMPONENTS
  roscpp
  ...
  soccerref
)

...

catkin_package(
 CATKIN_DEPENDS roscpp ... soccerref
)

<!-- package.xml -->

<buildtool_depend>catkin</buildtool_depend>
...
<build_depend>soccerref</build_depend>
...
<run_depend>soccerref</run_depend>

Now that your package knows it needs soccerref, you can run catkin_make to generate the ROS message for GameState.msg:

$ catkin_make   # make sure you are in 'catkin_ws' and not 'catkin_ws/src'

Use roslaunch:

$ roslaunch soccerref simref.py

Occasionally, when you press Start Game on the soccerref GUI, you might see an error message like this:

This error typically happens when there is already another instance of Gazebo (gzserver) still running in the background. To solve this, you can run the following commands:

$ ps aux | grep gz   # Find any process that has 'gz' in it (like 'gzserver' and 'gzclient')
$ sudo kill <pid>    # the second column has the 5ish-digit process id (pid)

Now you can try pressing Start Game again.

The main soccerref GUI:

The soccerref GUI refereing a simulated match: