// ROS robotics news: tutorials Archives

Recently in tutorials Category

sensors.jpg
One of the new features you may have noticed on the ROS website are the Robots portal pages, which  They are designed to help you get a new ROS enabled robot up and running quickly.

But what do you do if you are trying to build your own robot?

Just head over to the new Sensors page, where there is a list of sensors supported by official ROS packages and many other sensors supported by the ROS community. The Sensors portal pages have detailed tutorials and information about different types of sensors, organized by category. Hopefully, the sensor portal pages can also become a resource for developers and inspire interoperability between similar sensors.

If your robots or sensors are not on the list, you can help improve the portals by adding your documented packages and tutorials.

Working together, we can manage exponential growth!

mingw_demo.png

While not yet complete, ROS is now one step closer to working on Windows using the Minimal GNU compiler toolchain thanks to the work of Daniel Stonier and Yujin Robot. If you are a windows user and have experience using MinGW or cross compiling there is a tutorial showing how to use Qt with ROS on Windows up for people interested in testing and improving ROS support for Windows.


Announcement from Daniel Stonier of Yujin Robot to ros-users

Greetings all,

We've had a need to develop test and debugging apps for our test and factory
engineers, who, unfortunately (for them!), only use windows. While service
robotics' patched ros tree could give us msvc apps, it wasn't patched into
ros mainstream and it couldn't let us share our own testing apps on linux
with the test engineers on windows without building two of each application.

So...enter mingw cross <http://mingw-cross-env.nongnu.org/>! We've now got
this patched in eros/ros up to being able to run a talker/listener and add
int server/client along with inbuilt support for qt as well.

If you're interested in being a guinea pig to test this, or just curious,
you can find a tutorial on the ros wiki here:

http://www.ros.org/wiki/eros/Tutorials/Qt-Ros on Windows

If you come across any bugs (in the tutorial or the installation), reply to
this email, or contact me on irc in OFTC #ros so we can squash the buggers.

Hopefully as time goes by we can patch support in for other commonly used
ros packages as well as adding rosdeps upstream to the mingw cross
environment. We also aim to get ros running on msvc in a more complete way,
but that will need to wait for the rebuild of the ros build environment that
is looming.

Cheers!
Daniel Stonier (Yujin Robot)

urdf_rviz.png

Patrick Goebel of PI Robot has put together an excellent tutorial on doing 3D head tracking with ROS. In Part 1 he covers configuring TFs, setting up the URDF model and configuration of Dynamixel AX-12+ servos for controlling the pan and tilt of a Kinect.

Besides more accurate depth estimation, one benefit of using a 3D sensor to perform head tracking is that it allows for the rejection of false positives by providing a means for the robot to distinguish between a person's head and a picture of a person's head.

You may also be interested in his previous tutorial on OpenCV Head Tracking.


Announcement from Patrick Goebel of Pi Robot to ros-users

Hello ROS users,

I have put together a little tutorial on using tf to point your robot's
head toward different locations relative to different frames of
reference. Eventually I'll get the tutorial onto the ROS wiki, but for
now it lives at:

http://www.pirobot.org/blog/0018/

The tutorial uses the ax12_controller_core package from the ua-ros-pkg
repository. Many thanks to Anton Rebguns for patiently helping me get
the launch files set up.

Please post any questions or bug reports to http://answers.ros.org or
email me directly.

Patrick Goebel
The Pi Robot Project
http://www.pirobot.org

Kinect_iRobot_Create.jpg

Melonee Wise has put together a tutorial on Adding a Kinect to an iRobot Create, which we hope will help those of you interested using the Kinect on inexpensive platforms. It walks you through two different methods of powering the Kinect directly off the Create (thanks Sparkfun!).

Tutorial

I Heart Robotics has a five-part, but ongoing "Vision for Robotics" series that helps readers integrate OpenCV into their robotics applications. They also put together a useful review of ROS USB cam drivers, which might be a useful pre-requisite.

I Heart Robotics also has a ROS repository that includes code for all the tutorials below. Fantastic!

sharp_robotica.pngBilly McCafferty of sharprobotica.com has put together a six-part series on design and testing concerns for developing ROS packages. This series tackles these challenges step-by-step, layer-by-layer:

If you're thinking about the right design patterns and architectures for ROS packages, this series is definitely worth a look.