Robotics Class 2011

This is the class page for the 2011 Robotics Class going on over the summer at http://hacdc.org.

WORK IN PROGRESS

Course prerequisites:

Basic knowledge of python programming Basic linux knowledge (operating from the unix command line) Basic linear algebra

Course syllabus:

Class 1: Introduction to ROS and the robot we will be using for the class.

Class 2: Using the smach executive to write robot state machines. Assignment will involve writing a "safing state machine" that monitors the robot state and puts the robot in a safe state if particular conditions are met.

Class 3: Introduction to computer vision and face detection using vision_opencv. Assignment will involve processing image data and using the OpenCV toolkit to do face detection (the routine is already provided in OpenCV).

Class 4: Introduction to moving the robot base. The assignment will continue the face detection of the previous class, we will move the robot to track a face, both rotating the base to keep a constant face position, and moving the base forward and backward to keep a constant face scale.

Class 5: Introduction to stereo vision and point clouds. Visualizing 3D point cloud data using rviz. Using tf to transform point clouds into the robot base frame.