AI Hub Tampere will organize a 4-hour workshop on 6th of November on ROS2 and DDS. Robotics software is currently very diverse and that causes problems when integrating different software products together. One solution for that might be ROS2, a successor to ROS1, which has been widely used in research groups. Unfortunately, the technical foundations of ROS1 prohibit its use in industrial applications. The successor called ROS2 was created to answer to these technical problems. This workshop is intended for audience that knows some C/C++ programming, since majority of robotics software is developed with these languages. We will also use Python for the parts utilizing computer vision algorithms, because most cutting-edge research is done with it.
In this workshop we practice a basic usage of ROS2 and its underlying standardized middleware technology called DDS, short for Data Distribution Service. We will provide a simple virtual machine, that contains Ubuntu Linux and ROS2 installed in it. ROS2 should also work with other operating systems, but here at university we have experience only on using it with Linux. This means that some familiarity with Linux is beneficial when signing up for the workshop.
We have been preparing a robotic platform called M12 to be used in the workshop. This robot is a diesel-powered wheel loader, which has been equipped with external sensing equipment and high-end hydraulic systems. Unfortunately, because of the guidelines for handling the covid-19 situation, we cannot hold the workshop at our heavy machine laboratory test site. There is no room for groups of people and the weather at November will prohibit working outside. In near future, we will provide a recording of some sensor data in form of a ROS2 bag from driving the M12. In the workshop we will playback this data and see how this feature can be used in developing robotics software.
You can read more about the M12 machine and its software here.
Because of the arrangement problems, we have been also preparing smaller robot platform based on MiR100 robot. In the workshop we will use this machine for real robot testing and in addition use some prerecorded data from the M12 machine.
If you have any questions about this workshop, feel free to ask me or Ritva Savonsaari through email: andrei.ahonen@tuni.fi (I can answer the workshop technical content questions),
ritva.savonsaari@tuni.fi (Ritva can answer more general AI-HUB questions and tell more about what we have to offer)