ROS installation and tutorials

[alaurenzi]

The first task is to install ROS Kinetic on your Ubuntu 16.04 system. Then, follow the tutorials that you can find online to understand

• [x] how ROS helps you connecting nodes (where computation is done) though several communication primitives (topics, services, actions)
• [x] how to create and compile a ROS package with catkin
• [x] advertise and subscribe to topics
• [x] write service clients and servers
• [x] understand the TF system (how ROS broadcasts information about reference frames)
• [x] broadcasts TFs of a robot with a robot_state_publisher connected with a joint_state_publisher
• [x] understand the Rviz tool (robot visualizer)
  • [x] unerstand URDF concepts

ROS is an open source tool. You don't generally expect to find the same documentation quality as in MATLAB, but there is plenty of online resources, and google is your friend! Write below to ask for help.

[liesrock]

Useful slides and material about ROS can be found also here:

https://rsl.ethz.ch/education-students/lectures/ros.html

[EnricoMingo]

IMPORTANT: for the C++ tutorials you need a proper UI. At this link you can find a tutorial to install QtCreator with the ROS plugin to develop ros nodes in C++.

[EnricoMingo]

Very good @francesco-roscia, @matteosodano! Do you have any question or concern on these tutorials?

[matteosodano]

We do not have any particular question on the concepts. Anyway, there was no tutorial that explained how to visualize our own URDF in RViz: the tutorials on these arguments were self-contained. Can you suggest some particularly good guide/website on this argument? Otherwise we will search something by ourselves.

[EnricoMingo]

The broadcasts TFs of a robot with a robot_state_publisher connected with a joint_state_publisher tutorial should be the one you are looking for. In that you can use your own URDF.

[matteosodano]

Thank you Enrico. We solved the problem: we forgot the last URDF tutorial.

[EnricoMingo]

Perfect, I'll close