robots.net blog for Pi Robot

21 Apr 2013

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 02:19:26 GMT

Fuerte and Groovy versions of ROS By Example now Available

Both PDF and paperback versions are available on Lulu.com:

Fuerte: PDF / Paperback

Groovy: PDF / Paperback

24 Oct 2012

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 13:38:46 GMT

Fuerte Cheat Sheet Available for ROS By Example Book

A short conversion guide is now available for using the ROS By Example book with ROS Fuerte instead of Electric. The guide can be found at the following link:

http://code.google.com/p/ros-by-example/downloads/detail?name=RBX1_Fuerte_Cheat_Sheet.pdf

3 Oct 2012

Wed, 3 Oct 2012 00:36:47 GMT

The First Book on ROS for Beginners

I have written a book on ROS for beginners called ROS By Example and available on Lulu in paperback or PDF.

PLEASE NOTE: The book was written for and tested against ROS Electric under Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid) and 11.10 (Oneric). Some of the code samples definitely will not work under ROS Fuerte at this time and Debian packages for ROS Electric are not available for Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise).

Please also note that the book assumes that the reader has already worked through the ROS Beginner Tutorials.

4 Jan 2011

Tue, 4 Jan 2011 19:29:58 GMT

ROS Head Tracking Tutorial Available

For those of you getting started with ROS, I have written up a do-it-yourself tutorial for tracking a colored object using a web cam and AX-12 pan and tilt servos. You can find it here:

ROS by Example: Visual Object Tracking

26 Nov 2010

Fri, 26 Nov 2010 15:01:12 GMT

Robot Cartography: ROS + SLAM

In this short article on using SLAM with ROS, I have posted a couple of videos showing Pi Robot mapping out part of an apartment using a Hokuyo laser scanner and the gmapping package. See

http://www.pirobot.org/blog/0015/

2 Nov 2010

Tue, 2 Nov 2010 22:08:36 GMT

Pi Robot Meets ROS

For the past several months, I have been learning the basics of ROS from Willow Garage. At the same time, I have been testing Mike Ferguson's "Poor Man's Lidar" or PML as an alternative to a more expensive laser range finder. The results are encouraging--at least for obstacle avoidance and simple navigation tasks. You can see the report at:

http://www.pirobot.org/blog/0014/

10 Aug 2010

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 20:29:24 GMT

Robot Agents, Messages and The Society of Mind

I recently converted most of the C# code for my Pi Robot project to Python. At the same time, I am changing the programming architecture to use message passing among nodes. To get started, I wrote up a little introduction to the topic at:

Robot Agents, Messages and The Society of Mind

30 Apr 2010

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 21:41:05 GMT

An Introduction to Robot Coordinate Frames

I finally had a chance to write up the math behind the Pi Robot arm tracking video. Keep in mind that I am only using the two shoulder joints in each arm--the elbow and wrist servos are fixed--so the inverse kinematics is fairly straightforward. Later on I'll have to deal with the other joints...

Here is the link to the write-up:

http://www.pirobot.org/blog/0011/

--patrick

23 Mar 2010

Tue, 23 Mar 2010 18:15:28 GMT

Visually-Guided Grasping

Here is a followup video to my previous blog entry. In this video, a number of independent behavioral threads are running to enable the robot to track and grasp the green balloon. Whenever the balloon is grasped, the robot turns its attention to the red balloon. When the green balloon is released, tracking turns again to it and the red balloon is ignored. I use RoboRealm to do the green/red tracking. There is a sonar sensor on the inside of the left hand that tells the robot when something is ready to be grasped. It can also do this using vision alone along with some trigonometry, but the result is more reliable when using the sensor.

--patrick

http://www.pirobot.org