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). Ubuntu 10.04 LTS will be used for this class. Laptop with VirtualBox installed, capable of running a 30GB disk image that requires 1 GB of RAM.

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. Assignment will involve trying to find the floor in the point cloud.