Let’s program a robot at PyCon! Not just some dumb robot that runs around the room and bumps into stuff. Let’s program a baby version of one of those big fancy arms you see at a factory. No, really, we can do this, it is not as hard as you think! It turns out one of the most sophisticated robotics frameworks in the world runs on python and it is open source. This talk is a crash course on Robot Operating System (ROS) and how it can be used to build some wicked cool robots for fun and world domination. We’ll cover the libraries that do the fancy math that help your robot to move and figure out where it is, and what it should do. We will also cover the ROS build system which can be a bit scary, and some of the great visualization and debugging tools in ROS.