Software Development for Robotics

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this repo contains the steps for setup your environment and necessary source code for the class

📝 Table of Contents

• 1. Course Overview
• 2. PC Setup
• 3. ROS Setup
• 4. Notes
• 5. Assignments
• 6. Projects

🏁 1. Course Overview

 This course will teach the students fundamentals of robotics along with various software, hardware for robot developments based on the Robot Operating System (ROS) which is a flexible framework for writing robot software. It is a collection of tools, libraries, and conventions that aim to simplify the task of creating complex and robust robot behavior across a wide variety of robotic platforms.

 This course will provide hands-on experience with lab activities and practical knowledge from semester-long projects. During the semester, the students will build a Battle Bot based on a customized TurtleBot with ROS. And the class will host a battle bot competition at the end of the semester as a part of the class. This is a demo video

💾 2. Environment Setup

2.1 PC Setup

2.1.1 Personal PC Setup

During this class, we are going to use Ubuntu 18.04 as our main operating system.

• If you already have Ubuntu 16.04 insteaded, it is preferable to upgrade to 18.04 but not necessary to do so.
• If you have a windows operating system, please follow this link to install virtual box + ubuntu on your system.(replace ubuntu 16.04 with 18.04)
• [optional] If you have a windows 10 on your system. You call try out Windows 10 Bash & Linux Subsystem. it is a command line bash based system on windows, it has most function of Ubuntu, but it doesnt provide a GUI interface.(you can use X Servers to bypass it, but it is bugyy to use)

2.1.2 Raspberry PI Setup

Since its not really a good idea to put your laptop/desktop on a 0.2m^3 robot, we are going to use Raspberry Pi as our ob board PC.

• Raspberry Pi 3: Please follow this video link to setup your raspberry pi
• Raspberry Pi 4: Since the offical Ubuntu support for raspberry pi 4 havent come out yet. You can install Raspbian Buster with desktop, the setup process would be the similar as above.
• DVI type monitor Setup:

  sudo nano /boot/config.txt
  

  ### edit these lines ###
  hdmi_force_hotplug=1
  hdmi_drive=1
  hdmi_group=2
  hdmi_mode=82
  

🚀 3. ROS Setup

ROS(Robot Operating System) is a popular framework for building the software for robot now adays, which we will also use it to build our Robot.

• if you are installing ROS on Ubuntu 16.04 (Personal PC or Raspberry pi). you can follow this link to install
• if you are installing ROS on Ubuntu 18.04 (Personal PC or Raspberry pi). you can follow this link to install
• if you are installing ROS on Raspbian (Raspberry pi). you can follow this link to install

✍️ 4. Notes

1. when using catkin_make on raspberry pi: Use catkin_make -j2 instead of catkin_make

"-j2" means using 2 cores for computing.
Raspberry pi has 4 core process by default, if didn't use "-j2", it will use all 4 core process to compute, which may result in crash or froze.