Week-9

Formula1 Installation Issue

The Formula1 follow line was developed by now and supported ROS Noetic. However as noetic is very recent so it had its compatibility issues. When I tried to install this robot on my computer, I faced some issues which I have described in the issue below. I opened up an issue in the CustomRobots repository of JdeRobot. Link to Issue

Inverted Pendulum Robot

As I could not proceed with the Formula1 car, so I decided to work with a simpler robot. I found the inverted pendulum robot in gazebo tutorials website. I got it working with ROS Noetic after spending some time and reading some forums. The main purpose of using this robot was because we wanted a demonstration of a working robot with VisualCircuit which connects to ROS and Gazebo. We were not looking in to any complex behaviour but rather we wanted to get a ROS and Gazebo working with our tool as soon as possible and publish a tweet. This involved a robot which had a camera attached to one of its legs. There were some moving joints infront of the robot. A ROS camera block connected to that robot using ROS topics and performed color filtering as well as edge detection on the provided video stream.

Block Composition

Another thing I started working on was block composition. The basic idea of this was to compose multiple blocks into one simple block. The main idea was to reduce the complexity of the tool and make it more modular. For example, if you created an application of 5 or 10 connected blocks which provided an independent functionality. Now if you want that functionality in some other application, you should not copy and paste those 10 blocks which would increase the complexity of that circuit. Rather you can package them all inside one block and then easily import that block into your application. Link to Issue