KevsRobots Learning Platform

Learn ROS with me

5% Percent Complete

Overview
Setting up the Raspberry Pi 4 environment
Setting Docker for ROS
Build the ROS2 Container
Setting up VSCode
First ROS2 Program
ROS2 Python Packages
Docker and X11
RViz2

Introduction

Get started with ROS, the Robot Operating System and learn how to build robots using this industry standard framework

By Kevin McAleer, Duration: 3 Minutes

Screenshot of the imager tool

Overview

This course will teach you all about the Robot Operating System, how to use the ROS2 on a Raspberry Pi 4, and how to write your own ROS programs.

What you’ll learn

In this course you will learn:

  • How to setup a Raspberry Pi for use with ROS
  • How to install docker on a Raspberry Pi
  • Setting up the ROS environment within a docker container
  • ROS versions
  • Creating a ROS workspace with Colcon
  • ROS Commandline tools
    • colcon
    • ros2
    • ros nodes list
    • ros pkg list
    • qrt
  • Creating a simple ROS program
  • Creating a package
  • Creating launch files
  • Visualising nodes with qrt
  • TL
  • LIDAR
    • Laser Scan data
    • SLAM

About ROS

ROS (Robot Operating System) is an open-source, meta-operating system for your robot. It provides the tools and libraries that allow you to quickly create and deploy robotics applications. ROS provides a flexible framework for writing and executing code, as well as a wide variety of libraries and tools for navigation, manipulation, and perception. ROS is used by many leading robotics companies and research institutions worldwide.

Don’t be scared

ROS can be very intimidating at first, but don’t worry - it’s actually quite manageable once you understand the basics. This course is a great starting point for unpacking and learning how ROS works.

What you’ll need

Item Description
A Raspberry Pi 4 4Gb or 8Gb (recommended)
A Lidar sensor A1 LiDAR sensor from Slamtec

ROS can be installed on Windows, macOS or Linux; however for robotics we often want to install this on a single board computer such as the Raspberry Pi 4. In fact ROS.org supports ROS on Raspberry Pi 4 running the Ubuntu OS, or the standard 64 bit version of the Raspberry Pi OS and running ROS within a Docker container; this is what we will use in this course.

The 8Gb version of the Raspberry Pi 4 is recommended as ROS is quite memory hungry, and the Raspberry Pi cannot use a large swap file as it damages the SD card over time (due to the large number of writes to the flash storage).

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