ROS Lecture

Tomorrow we will have a second ROS lecture and this time it will be hands on practical example how to program an industrial UR5 Robot (during lecture just a simulator of it) using ROS and MoveIt!. We will do a small recap about ROS and then try to setup the environment, create a new ROS package and write a simple robot control algorithm as well as test it on the simulator. There will be some lecture notes explaining the process, but it will be a lot easier to understand by joining the lecture as you can ask about parts, which are unclear.

Unfortunately, we are unable to have a ROS setup on lab computers, but if you have a computer running Linux, you can install ROS Indigo on it and try to follow the same steps during the lecture. Otherwise, you can download this Virtual Machine: http://nootrix.com/software/ros-indigo-virtual-machine/ and run it using Virtual Box (https://www.virtualbox.org/) or VMWare (http://www.vmware.com/).

I will be using the following setup:

Ubuntu Trusty 14.04

ROS Indigo http://wiki.ros.org/indigo/Installation/Ubuntu

ROS Industrial - sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-industrial-core

MoveIt - sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-moveit-full

Recommended additional software (not mandatory):

Terminator http://technicalworldforyou.blogspot.no/2012/11/install-terminator-terminal-emulator-in.html

vim - sudo apt-get install vim

Sublime Text 3 https://www.sublimetext.com/3

The rest, we will go through together. Also try to have an internet connection as there will be few things to download.

There will be an optional ROS assignment where you get to expand the ROS node we write in the lecture and test it on the real UR5 robot we have in the lab. It will follow right after Oblig3 and should be easy to complete after following this lecture. And it¡¯s always much more fun to work on real hardware :-)