Google Summer Of Code 2021

Robotics-Academy is an open source collection of exercises and challenges to learn robotics in a practical way. There are exercises about drone programming, about computer vision, about mobile robots, about autonomous cars, etc. It is mainly based on Gazebo simulator and ROS. The main goal of this project was to migrate three industrial robots ... Read More

libgazebo_ros_moveit_planning_scene While connecting with Mobile Manipulation exercise, we were facing two errors and one of them was Failed to load plugin libgazebo_ros_moveit_planning_scene.so: libgazebo_ros_moveit_planning_scene.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory. As mentioned in the previous blogs, this is a model... Read More

Machine Vision We considered having a separate pull request for Rviz during last week’s meeting so that other developers can incorporate it into other exercises more easily. We decided to implement this with Machine Vision exercise because Pick And Place exercise was already integrated with Rviz. As a result, I’ll need to first create a pull re... Read More

COB Scan Unifier The cob_driver stack includes packages that provide access to the Care-O-bot hardware through ROS messages, services and actions. E.g. for mobile base, arm, camera sensors, laser scanners, etc. However, terminal shows up with error Cannot locate node of type [scan_unifier_node] in package [cob_scan_unifier]. Make sure file exis... Read More

Mobile Manipulation Exercise There were several issues that we were facing in the migration of Machine Vision Exercise which are as follows: Not only was the object’s position incorrectly recorded, but the shape identified by object shape filter was incorrect as well. And we had no clue why this behaviour was occurring. Yijia also stated ... Read More

Pull Request We had our project evaluation this week, and I had to make a pull request from my local branch to JdeRobot’s master branch in order to do so. To finish this process, I first removed all of the redundant files that had been generated after executing the rsync command from my local branch. Commit : Removed the redundant exercises A... Read More

Gazebo_mimic_joint_plugin Mimic joint plugin is a simple (Model) plugin for Gazebo in order to add to Gazebo the mimic joint functionality that exists in URDF (ROS). Last week, the simulation wasn’t operational because of an error related to this plugin. The error shown in the terminal was: [Err] [Plugin.hh:180] Failed to load plugin libroboti... Read More

RQT Widget The bug mentioned last week hasn’t been fixed yet, and it’s nearly put the project on hold. To avoid this, I chose to focus on other projects so that the project could continue to progress. I chose to concentrate on the widget because working with Rviz required first connecting the exercise. The final widget looked like this: Conn... Read More

APIs Robotics Academy is a web-based learning platform for robotics that abstracts other ROS operations. It accomplishes this by utilising APIs that handle all of the work behind the scenes. There are three types of APIs defined: GUI, HAL, and ENV. The details of these APIs are covered in the following sections. HAL HAL(Hardware Abstraction L... Read More

Version Control This week didn’t start out the way I had planned, but it did teach me a valuable lesson about the significance of version control! I was working on adding gazebo to the exercise when I came upon this. I realised that the existing exercises didn’t seem to work properly. The reason for this is yet unknown, although it was most lik... Read More

PyQt5 GUI This is the first week of coding period, so I started with designing UI for the web-templates. I began by making a simple PyQt5 GUI for a pick-and-place exercise. PyQt5 is a comprehensive set of Python bindings for Qt v5. It is implemented as more than 35 extension modules and enables Python to be used as an alternative application d... Read More

Docker Bind Mount The first step in starting development in a docker container is to use bind mounts or volumes so that the changes in the docker container can be seen without having to rebuild the image. Bind mounts can be used to create side-by-side development environments and also to share data that needs to persist longer than the lifespan... Read More

Google Summer of Code starts with the Community Bonding period where we get to know about the community and get familiar with the code base and work style. The first week of community bonding was all about getting familiar with JdeRobt Robotics Acadmey. Currently there are nine exercises that are updated in v2.3. The primary goal of this projec... Read More