ROS 2 Training Event Hosted by RPI Featuring New Advanced Topic

At the start of March, Tiffany Cappellari, my colleague, and I made our way to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy NY, to deliver ROS2 Training to members of our ROS-Industrial community. Rensselaer Polytechnic, in addition to being a prestigious academic institution, has been a proud partner in project work with many other ROS-Industrial Consortium members, collaborators, and those in need of more advanced capability. RPI kindly hosted our first in-person training of calendar year 2023.

Tiffany Cappellari introduced the experienced students to a new motion planning pipeline exercise utilizing the Tesseract toolbox while I introduced the fundamentals of ROS 2 to engineers and developers of a wide range of experience levels. All our attendees were able to explore a variety of capabilities and packages for motion planning, perception, and image processing, either native to ROS 2 or hosted by ROS-Industrial's many open-source toolbox repositories.

Workshop attendees hard at work on motion planning exercises in an RPI Low Center for Innovation Lecture Hall

Workshop attendees included graduate students, mechanical engineers, software developers, and project managers that together were enabled to discuss, in context, how the training tools can be applied to their systems and processes. For participants familiar with ROS 1, our in-person discussions included porting best-practices and lessons learned about the framework & operational differences between the two. Our exercise-based fundamentals course begins the development of a basic ROS workspace and setting up basic ROS packages for incorporation into other projects. From there, all trainees construct URDFs, basic motion planning packages using MoveIt, and Python script launch files to generate a robot workcell, plan and enact movements with that robot, and bring it all up through one, simple script.

Trainees also tried ‘Building a Perception Pipeline’, a special topic exercise that introduced several tools from Point Cloud Library (PCL) to filter and segment camera data for use in manipulation tasks. Our latest special topic, ‘Motion Planning with Tesseract’ highlighted the motion planning pipeline capabilities in Tesseract to create smooth, optimized trajectories.

RPI’s precocious graduate students kindly took us on a tour of their workspaces, including spaces where the Tesseract toolbox utilized for the special topic on motion planning is implemented on hardware.

All training materials can be found on the ROS-Industrial Training wiki, and they are updated regularly for new capabilities. Check out the github for a setup script used for a VM or Docker to get a head-start on system settings if you’re operating on an OS other than Ubuntu 20.04. We hope to see you at our next training event in July 2023 in San Antonio, TX!

Note: If you would like to learn more about hosting a ROS-Industrial Consortium training event, please reach out to a team member! We are excited to bring our expertise and knowledge to you.