Robotics Software Engineer PicoDegree | Introduction | ROS with Webots | Part 1
Wish to get into shoes of Robotics Software Engineer and see the complete cycle of mobile robot development. Also learn and impelement robotics concepts using ROS with a great simulator named Webots. Then you are at the right place. Soft_illusion Channel is back with a new video..!! (A channel which aims to help the robotics community).
#ROS_tutorial_series #Webots_ROS #ROS
0:00 Soft Illusion intro video
0:08 Introduction to Robotics Software picodegree
01:50 Series(7 videos) summery
03:41 Stark Robot Features
04:55 Setup Environment with webots and ROS
09:13 Launch Webots simulator with stark robot
09:51 Prerequisites videos of this series.
Important Links:
Github Repo of PicoDegree: https://github.com/Soft-illusion/Robo...
rosdep to install package dependencies: http://wiki.ros.org/rosdep
Link of playlist to create custom robot with features like GPS, IMU, Camera etc : • Making Custom Robot in Webots
Everyday we see a lot of people eager to learn, eager to enter the field of robotics, but they all feel the lack of a good starter pack.
Hence Soft Illusion has come up with this PicoDegree which introduces several concepts of robotics. This tutorial series can be considered a good place to get you started with Robotics Software Engineering.
Before starting the series it's good to get acquainted with ROS as well as Webots. At the end of the tutorial series you will have a fully functional mobile robot which will be able to localize, navigate, avoid obstacles and a lot more.
The tutotial series has been divided into 7 videos:
1. Introduction video - This video shows you how to get started with the github repo that we are developing, and installing the pre-requisites. It also explains how you can either create your own robot or use the Stark robot made by us.
2. Static and Dynamic URDF - This helps ROS understand the actual physical structure of the different links on the robot and where all the sensors and actuators are located.
3. Teleop - This video will show how you can control your robot using the keyboard. The video also explains how Webots services is used to enable the different sensors, and command actuators using sensor values.
4. Mapping - Here you will learn how to have your robot understand and get a feel of its environment using a LiDAR.
5. Navigate - Once the robot undertands it's world, we can use different path planning and optimization algorithms to make it go from point A to point B. This will also include the configuration of costmap and different planners.
6. Obstacle Avoidance - Now when the robot is traveling from point A to B we don’t want it crashing into obstacles or humans. Hence we need good obstacle avoidance algorithms. It will also plan a path around obstacles.
7. Applications - Finally we will use all the above-learned knowledge to enable our robot to perform specific tasks/applications.
This Introduction video will show you the following:
1. Introduces the Stark robot which comes with the following features:
a. 4 wheel drive
b. 2 axis camera movement mechanism
c. Camera
d. LiDAR
e. Linear and rotary actuators
f. IMU
g. GPS
h. Distance Sensor
2. Introduction of the github repository created by us: https://github.com/Soft-illusion/Robo....
a. Create a workspace using: mkdir -p webots_ws/src
b. cd webots_ws/src
c. git clone https://github.com/Soft-illusion/Robo...
d. git checkout Introduction
e. Next all the dependencies needs to be installed using rosdep. The steps have been explained in the wiki page: http://wiki.ros.org/rosdep and also in the video.
It includes installing rosdep, init, update and then finally rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src -r -y. This installs all the required packages specified in the package.xml.
As you will notice, ros-noetic-webots-ros also gets installed. This is because we will be using the Webots Simulator in this project.
h. catkin_make - Here all the packages in the source folder gets built.
i. source devel/setup.bash - This is necessary for ROS to understand all the built packages in the repository.
k. roslaunch bringup master.launch - As you will notice in the launch file we use the webots-ros package and launch a Webots world.
3. The Stark robot in the robot can be created EITHER of the above 2 ways:
a. Git clone repo - As explained in the procedure above, in the Webots world the Stark robot is standing strong. The robot PROTO can also be found in the protos folder.
b. Make your custom robot from scratch - You can make the same Stark robot from scratch or you can make your own personalized robot using the instrauctions in this playlist: • Making Custom Robot in Webots
In the playlist you will see different videos to add the specific features on the robot such as Distance sensor, GPS, IMU, Linear Actuator, Rotary Actuator, Camera etc.