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Robotics and ROS 2 Essentials

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Re: Robotics and ROS 2 Essentials

#21

Post by adeptima »

Had a recent conversation with nephew about his robotics study, and it seems he’s overwhelmed with ROS, OpenCV, Python, AI transformers tutorial hell.

Told him we should go together to industrial expo - starting from 3d printing, molding, material science and robotics and spend some time together to hack into hard core C++ SDKs used by big tech like Nvidia and Co, and look how to developed linear algebra and statistic on real life examples.

His dream is to automate small mid business manufacturing, and become a Steve Job like figure one day.

What’s the good information and resources to follow and educate about real life robotics?

Any tips or even sarcastic comments are welcome. Please help to be a cool uncle ;)

Re: Robotics and ROS 2 Essentials

#22

Post by spwa4 »

throwup238 wrote: post #20
margalabargala wrote: post #8

While it's used in industry sometimes, ROS is really one of those by-and-for-academia tools. There's a reason it's near-universally reviled, and why "migrate off of ROS" is a standing goal at a lot of robotics companies. There's also a reason why it's a standing goal, rather than a completed goal. It does little or nothing really well, but it does everything kind of okay. There's a lot of "alternatives", most of whic…

Can you explain what ROS does/is to the uninitiated? Why is everyone still using it if its such a trainwreck?

It's a framework.

* it's a loosely coupled messaging framework (so you can have 5 daemons that talk to each other to accomplish control at multiple levels)

* it's got robotics libraries with difficult robotics algorithms (PID tuning, forward and reverse kinematics, a way to run control loops very fast, ...)

* it's got sensor libraries (algorithms) and drivers

* it's got a simulator

* it's a linux distro specialized for robotics

You can keep going for a while with this.

Re: Robotics and ROS 2 Essentials

#23

Post by puffybunion »

adeptima wrote: post #21

Had a recent conversation with nephew about his robotics study, and it seems he’s overwhelmed with ROS, OpenCV, Python, AI transformers tutorial hell. Told him we should go together to industrial expo - starting from 3d printing, molding, material science and robotics and spend some time together to hack into hard core C++ SDKs used by big tech like Nvidia and Co, and look how to developed linear algebra and statisti…

Can someone that hasn't achieved Steve Jobs' accomplishments show you the way to them? Perhaps you should gift him a biography about Steve Jobs.

Re: Robotics and ROS 2 Essentials

#24

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

brutus1979 wrote: post #4
jvanderbot wrote: post #2

For a while new grads had a severe lack of hands on ROS experience. Though many companies don't use ROS, it is so entrenched in the industry that most solutions look similar enough for transferrable skills. (Src: was hiring mgr in robotics) Highly recommend if you want to get into robotics you have ROS experience and demos / stories at hand.

I'm really intrigued by robotics as future career. How would you rate it for the next 10-15 years? I'm seriously thinking of investing in a masters degree focused on robotics (CMU). I'm close to 50 and already have a cs PhD. Just intrigued by it and feel it might have a longer career (when it takes off).

FWIW, I hear that CMU is a very good school for robotics.

Re: Robotics and ROS 2 Essentials

#25

Post by dbcurtis »

margalabargala wrote: post #8

While it's used in industry sometimes, ROS is really one of those by-and-for-academia tools. There's a reason it's near-universally reviled, and why "migrate off of ROS" is a standing goal at a lot of robotics companies. There's also a reason why it's a standing goal, rather than a completed goal. It does little or nothing really well, but it does everything kind of okay. There's a lot of "alternatives", most of whic…

Sure. A ROS system, being a collection of independent nodes coupled with a publish/subscribe messaging system, allows you to mix and match nodes for whatever. So as a researcher, it is great. It gives you a "good enough" robot for the 98% that is necessary infrastructure for the 2% where you want to experiment/innovate. In an commercial setting, yeah, you run into scaling issues all over the place. Also, the code quality of different stock nodes is highly variable.

So ROS can get you past your A-round -- but count on addressing scalability and stability issues as go. Which is why "write out ROS" is on everybody's to-do list.

In any case, learning ROS is well worth it. As a hiring manager, I know I can easily teach you our system if you know ROS already.

Re: Robotics and ROS 2 Essentials

#26

Post by spieswl »

adeptima wrote: post #21

Had a recent conversation with nephew about his robotics study, and it seems he’s overwhelmed with ROS, OpenCV, Python, AI transformers tutorial hell. Told him we should go together to industrial expo - starting from 3d printing, molding, material science and robotics and spend some time together to hack into hard core C++ SDKs used by big tech like Nvidia and Co, and look how to developed linear algebra and statisti…

It sounds like your nephew has a project in mind. Start there with the basic dependencies and that will start laying out a competency roadmap which looks a lot like a curriculum.

Quick aside: Automate small/mid business manufacturing? Admirable, but will probably choke on the scale problem, so I think the journey will be vastly more interesting than the destination...which is good! Turns out there's a lot of robotics that can be broadly applied.

* Manufacturing --> robotic manipulation, controls, actuation, sensing, decision-making

** Robotic manipulation --> Linear algebra, likely Python and/or C++, some simulation tools

** Controls --> Manipulator platform, drivers, physical- and protocol-level choices

** Actuation --> You want to pick something up right? Air powered? Electric? Probably not hydraulic, but worth mentioning?

** Sensing --> What's your sensor suite? RGBD? LIDAR? Forces-torques? Combination of the above?

** Decision making --> FSM? Behaviour trees? Purely functional?

Repeat the decomposition and you'll probably be able to get down to the basic level of the robotics hierarchy of needs.

Re: Robotics and ROS 2 Essentials

#27

Post by spieswl »

fyhn wrote: post #3

Those of you who use ROS in production, do y'all use ROS 1 or 2? Do you maintain your own fork? I'm curious how people do this, with the upcoming Noetic deprecation.

I'd imagine it runs the gamut. ROS for some older places; those starting fresh are probably doing ROS 2.

Re: Robotics and ROS 2 Essentials

#28

Post by spieswl »

brutus1979 wrote: post #4
jvanderbot wrote: post #2

For a while new grads had a severe lack of hands on ROS experience. Though many companies don't use ROS, it is so entrenched in the industry that most solutions look similar enough for transferrable skills. (Src: was hiring mgr in robotics) Highly recommend if you want to get into robotics you have ROS experience and demos / stories at hand.

I'm really intrigued by robotics as future career. How would you rate it for the next 10-15 years? I'm seriously thinking of investing in a masters degree focused on robotics (CMU). I'm close to 50 and already have a cs PhD. Just intrigued by it and feel it might have a longer career (when it takes off).

Hugely bullish on the domain.

Re: Robotics and ROS 2 Essentials

#29

Post by oarfish »

sashank_1509 wrote: post #19
oarfish wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trust me, having your own crufty cobbled-together robotics code base that gets more and more insipid over time is way worse. 10/10 would start anything new with ROS.

We replaced ROS with GRPC, foxglove and our own code. Works reliably, much better to handle. Would recommend everyone else to try it

If you have the people to build something like this, could well be. If you're a smaller shop without any real experts, the structure enforced by ROS will prevent a lot of chaos and debugging.

Re: Robotics and ROS 2 Essentials

#30

Post by lnsru »

adeptima wrote: post #21

Had a recent conversation with nephew about his robotics study, and it seems he’s overwhelmed with ROS, OpenCV, Python, AI transformers tutorial hell. Told him we should go together to industrial expo - starting from 3d printing, molding, material science and robotics and spend some time together to hack into hard core C++ SDKs used by big tech like Nvidia and Co, and look how to developed linear algebra and statisti…

I also wanted to automate everything. Even got a mentor who brought me back to reality. Basically robot must be available 99,9999% of the time. One unsuccessful operation in 5 year of usage without maintenance. With less it makes no sense to automate because handling a production line incident might be very expensive.
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