4lhc / 100-days-of-ROS

100 Days of ROS Challenge

#100DaysOfROS

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Progress

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Goals

• Improve ROS1 and roscpp proficiency.
• Learn ROS2.
• Learn to create gazebo plugins.
• Sensor Fusion and SLAM with ROS.
• Build a ROS enabled AMR

Day 0:

Tasks

• Setup noetic & foxy
• Setup neovim for ROS development
  • Tried to get vim-ros working.
  • Autocompletion with neovim and LSP

Progress

• Autocompletion with neovim 0.5 failed. Will look at other options.

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Day 1:

Tasks

• Refresher: Watch Programming for Robotics (ROS) Course 1
  • ROS architecture and philosophy
  • ROS master and nodes
  • Topics and messages
  • Console commands
  • Catkin workspace and build system
  • Launch files
  • Gazebo

Progress

• Tried out various console commands.
• Created a launch file to visualize the robot in rviz - commit

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Day 2:

Tasks

• Watch Programming for Robotics (ROS) Course 2
  • Initialization of the nodes
  • NodeHandles

Progress

• Learned ros::init() and its various invocations.
• Learned about different types of NodeHandles
• Learned about various Logging macros
• commit

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Day 3:

Tasks

• Watch Programming for Robotics (ROS) Course 2
  • Subscribers and Publishers
  • ROS parameter server.

Progress

• Edit CmakeLists.txt to create multiple nodes.
• Created subscriber and publisher nodes
• Learned rosparam syntax.
• Misc:
  • Setup ROS Qt Creator plug-in
  • Fixed neovim LSP completion.
  • Got vim-ros working in noetic

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Day 4:

Tasks

• Watch Programming for Robotics (ROS) Course 3
  • URDF

Progress

• Created a basic urdf (visual only) for 3-wheeled omnibot.

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Day 5:

Tasks

• Xacro

Progress

• Created macros for wheel link and joints - omnibot.

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Day 6:

Tasks

• Watch Programming for Robotics (ROS) Course 3 -TF

Progress

• Tried out different cmd line tf tools.
  • tf_monitor, tf_echo and view_frames
• Quaternion Basics
  • Tested different quaternion operations -- Creating quaternion from rpy, rotations and conversion between tf2::Quaternion and geometry_msgs::Quaternion
• Started writing a tf2_static_broadcaster
• Today's Work

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Day 7:

Tasks

• tf2

Progress

• Wrote tf2 broadcaster.
  • tf2_ros::TransformBroadcaster
  • Creating callback functions for /odom topic
  • Today's Work

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Day 8:

Tasks

• Today I planned to finish adding lidar and meshes to the robot urdf. But spend too much time on freecad trying to fix the origin of an imported wheels.

Progress

• Created meshes for omnibot_description urdf geometry.

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Day 9:

Tasks

• Start work on CAD model

Progress

• Created base and started assembly.
• Fix origin errors with meshes

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Day 10:

Tasks

• Watch Programming for Robotics (ROS) Course 4 - Create a service file - Write a service client in roscpp

Progress

• Created a service client and service message.
• Had trouble with empty service request [TODO]
• Today's Work

Note

• Designing the omnibot model requires a sizeable chunk of time, which I'm lacking this week. Hence, I decided to resume learning roscpp and put the robot design on hold for the week. The current CAD model is for visualization only and it is not what something I want it to be.

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Day 11:

Tasks

• Continue with ROS Services
  • Write a service server in roscpp

Progress

• Created a service server.
• Learned to create persistent connections to services
• Different callback types that can be used for the ServiceServer: Functions, Class Methods and Functors
• Create headers to pass meta information about the client.
• Today's Work

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Day 12:

Tasks

• Learn Timers

Progress

• Created Timer callbacks of different flavours - Function, class methods.
• Explored various members of struct TimerEvent - last_expected, last_real etc
• Today's Work

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Day 13:

Tasks

• Learn Clock & Time
• Learn Callbacks & Spinning

Progress

• Learned about ros::Time, ros::Duration and ros::Rate examples.
• Use WallTime, WallDuration and WallRate when wall-clock is needed.
• Use Timers over Rate.
• Rate tries to maintain rate for a loop.
• Learned about single threaded spinners and experimented with ros::spin() and ros::spinOnce()
• Found couple of good sources to learn more about ROS callbacks and spinners
  • Do Timers run in different threads?
  • ROS Spinning, Threading, Queuing by Kohei Otsuka
• Today's Work

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Day 14:

Tasks

• Try out some ros packages and build something interesting
  • aruco_ros for 6-dof pose estimation.
  • follow_waypoints

Progress

• aruco_ros doesn't have noetic support yet, so I created a fork aruco_ros-noetic
• Successfully installed follow_waypoints

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Day 15:

Tasks

• Create launch file for aruco marker publisher.
• Write a node to check if a given list of markers are present in the world

Progress

• Created a world with aruco markers
  • Generated aruco marker models to be added to the world
• Launch file for marker_publisher
• Started writing a marker counter node.

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Day 16:

Tasks

• Continue yesterday's work

Progress

• Issues: After moving the marker models to local directory, the markers were visible in gazebo, but were not visible via camera plugin output. ie; the markers were invisible when the camera topic is visualized in rqt_gui
• As a temporary fix, the models were moved to ~/.gazebo/models
• Finished writing a node to check if a list of aruco markers are present in the world. link

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Day 17:

Tasks

• Actionlib
• Write an actionclient for move_base to send waypoints to the robot.

Progress

• Started creating an action client for move_base.

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Day 18:

Tasks

• Finish writing action client for move_base
• Load waypoints to rosparam server from yaml file.

Progress

• Successfully completed waypoint mission with move_base action client. link
• Created yaml file with params (waypoints and markers), loaded it into parameter server and read it from the node.
• Fix inflation radius to prevent the robot from getting stuck in the maze world.

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Day 19:

Tasks

• Continue learning actionlib

Progress

• Created an action message.
• Wrote an action client.
• Started writing action server.

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Day 20:

Tasks

• Today I try to setup and test rosserial on an arduino mega and a tiva evaluation board (TM4C123GXL).

Progress

• Installed rosserial-arduino
  • In the IDE, library version 0.7.9 seems to work, while the latest verison (0.9.1) available fails to compile the sketch.
  • After uploading the sketch, rosrun rosserial_python serial_node.py /dev/ttyUSB0 was run to rosserial client application.

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Day skipped due to academic work.

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Day 21:

Tasks

• actionlib - Write simpleActionServer with GoalCallBack.

Progress

• I rewrote the action server script that I wrote on Day 19, with goalcallback. I struggled a bit with the roswiki tutorials on actionlib. Need to find a better resource to learn.
• Note: In the streak tracker, today's commit will count towards the next day, as I am commiting after midnight.

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Day 22:

Tasks

• rviz visualisation.
• actionlib will be put on hold until I find a better tutorial.

Progress

• Started writing rviz marker visualisation

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Day 23:

Tasks

• rviz visualisation.

Progress

• Learned to add basic shapes to rviz