Robotics is a fast growing and rewarding field that is desperate for more engineering talent, but very few engineers know how to make the leap. New developers are often scared off because they don’t have the knowledge of electrical or mechanical engineering or they have heard the field is very difficult. Fortunately,recent improvements in both cloud robotics tools and robotic simulation have made it easier than ever to learn robotics. Recently, Robot Operating System (ROS) released its second version, ROS 2, in conjunction with its next generation simulation platform, Ignition Gazebo. This new version of ROS now supports Python 3 from the ground up. These releases make it possible to seamlessly toggle between simulated and real robots.
In this talk we’ll give you a crash course on how to build and run a simulated ROS 2 robot using Python 3. We’ll start by putting together a simple mobile base robot with a simulated sensor payload. Once we’ve put our virtual robot together we’ll walk through how to make the robot move, how to read data from the sensors, and how to “close the loop” by using sensor data to drive the robot’s behavior. In addition to covering the ROS 2 APIs, we’ll give a brief overview of the ROS command line tools, build system, and launch utilities so users can get familiar with the ROS development process.