Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Robotics and ROS 2 Essentials

henkirobotics.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 107 posts

Re: Robotics and ROS 2 Essentials

#91

Post by jvanderbot »

sashank_1509 wrote: post #10
brutus1979 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Wow, you’re still interested in learning at close to 50. That’s commendable. I did my masters at CMU robotics, and I would recommend doing it. Most students will be under 30, but CMU is a very practical school with an actual focus on building and programming robots, so if you’re proactive you can wet your feet plenty during your masters programme. Don’t expect to learn much from courses though, most of the learning h…

I'll try not be insulted by this. I'm 40+ and pivot myself nearly every year.

I think a lot of the "I don't see >40y/o swe" is a combo of:

There were more CS/IT grads from 2000 to today (After 40 you tend to move into management, consulting, or just switch careers, b/c SWE pays well.

After 40 you don't work at companies that churn through young devs (so young devs are less likely to work with > 40 y/o)

Re: Robotics and ROS 2 Essentials

#92

Post by esteve »

doganulus wrote: post #90
esteve wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you were not banned, your permission to post publicly was restricted because for the past three years you've been insulting, spreading lies and refusing to cooperate with other members of the community who actually want to change things and improve ROS. You're the one who is taking this personally because you claim Open Robotics is going after you. You've broken the code of conduct numerous times. The fact that y…

Groupthink is what happens when people don't share their dissenting views, so the group as a whole makes poor decisions. This is why it is a bad idea to silence dissent. This defines the ROS community, as you have exemplified. So it is good that you come and read the comments here. Welcome!

Many people in that thread you linked to have criticized ROS and explained the issues they have with the build system, some even proposed improvements, but somehow you're the only one that had to have their permissions restricted because of your behavior. And that's after repeatedly breaking the code of conduct for years. I've yet to see any technical contribution from you in ROS or any other project. You don't know what groupthink means, you only know to play the victim, and even in that, you're doing a terrible job.

Re: Robotics and ROS 2 Essentials

#93

Post by ModernMech »

f1shy wrote: post #72
ModernMech wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Robotics is very different from CS. At CMU robotics is huge and consists of thousands of researchers, with dozens of classes a MS student would have never encountered during their CS PhD or undergrad. It's true you can learn robotics from books, but CMU or any grad program has access to robotics hardware resources you can't find online or in the library. For example I took a course there that had the Aldebaran Nao as…

About the theory, you can learn yourself (I think) about practice, well, you may learn 1 or 2 platforms, but not all. If you get a job, you will for sure have to learn a lot from the platform they use, but much more of the application they do. Also the platforms get obsolete fast… What about buy 2nd hand/use/resell some hardware? I do not know how much cost a Ms in CMU, but sure does bot even compare to 20k. Sorry ma…

That’s $20k for one robot. If you want exposure to the breadth of hardware a ME at CMU would bring, you’d need access to the facilities as well. Robotics takes space most people don’t have.

Re: Robotics and ROS 2 Essentials

#94

Post by zoran3431 »

Ok I will just say it. ROS sucks and is a nightmare to use. When it does work it doesn't work well. I am not sure why we continue to use this outdated programming method. I have several robot. All of them could use ROS but I choose not to torture myself with what a mess that would be. Now a days coding or programming does not have to be unenjoyable. If you want to not use the dreaded ROS method to kill your brain then use ChatGPT 1.o this will change the way you code forever and you will actually enjoy it and look forward to coding with it. It takes the nightmare away that ROS created. No one wants to use ROS let's be honest. So finally there is a better way. ChatGPT 1.o makes ROS to look like an outdated mess.

Re: Robotics and ROS 2 Essentials

#95

Post by RugnirViking »

zoran3431 wrote: post #94

Ok I will just say it. ROS sucks and is a nightmare to use. When it does work it doesn't work well. I am not sure why we continue to use this outdated programming method. I have several robot. All of them could use ROS but I choose not to torture myself with what a mess that would be. Now a days coding or programming does not have to be unenjoyable. If you want to not use the dreaded ROS method to kill your brain the…

what?

I love ROS. There are setup files for stuff inside ROS (pathfinding etc) that I haven't enjoyed, and I've definitely struggled with things like keeping it all standardised with like dockerfiles, but the ROS itself? the concurrency is amazing. I constantly wish I had it on non-robotics projects...

as others have mentioned, it has scaling issues. But for getting things done on a base level, its super powerful. The fault-tolerance it allows has benefited our robots a lot - it's often possible even with severely degraded systems to manually guide one around.

I do agree with what others have said about how the best usages are often to not go too deep into the ecosystem and instead use its messaging and concurrency protocol in limited ways, and have a lot of your internal logic siloed, to avoid hardcore dependency. After all, the idea of this kind of system is to allow new nodes to listen to sensor data (coming in) and/or planning goals (going out) to be able to make their decisions. Not passing some kind of intermediate calculation to some other subsystem

Re: Robotics and ROS 2 Essentials

#96

Post by doganulus »

zoran3431 wrote: post #94

Ok I will just say it. ROS sucks and is a nightmare to use. When it does work it doesn't work well. I am not sure why we continue to use this outdated programming method. I have several robot. All of them could use ROS but I choose not to torture myself with what a mess that would be. Now a days coding or programming does not have to be unenjoyable. If you want to not use the dreaded ROS method to kill your brain the…

ROS is like the One Ring. Binds everything in the darkness but corrupts you into his dark slave slowly. It must be thrown away into the hot lava.

Re: Robotics and ROS 2 Essentials

#97

Post by Waterluvian »

Worked with ROS in research, industrial, and warehouse spaces for 12 years now, with fleets of hundreds to thousands of robots, tens to hundreds of thousands total worldwide. If there's one thing I could convince people of, it's to never use ROS to communicate between hosts.

If you want to use ROS for IPC on the same host, fine. That can all be debated but okay. But if you want to communicate to different robots, especially over WiFi, ROS is missing most of what you need, and it's things that roboticists do not need to reinvent as the Web has been grappling with these issues for a lot longer by millions of more developers.

- You will have to worry about versioning, either on your terms of when you're inevitably forced to

- Even if you don't plan on operating multiple versions in harmony (years later you'll regret believing you could get away with this), you have to deal with the edge effects of when you upgrade them remotely/on-site.

- ROS API definitions ("ROS Messages") are defincient. Yes, you really need to support `null` but you also need a whole lot more expessiveness in general. You'll invent your own string-but-actually-json message at some point.

- You end up manually dealing with well-trodden problems like compression, authentication, authorization.

- Failed comms, reconnecting, retrying, etc. will be a huge pain.

I think the simplest question to ask yourself/team is: "Could this be an HTTPS API? Could this be a Websocket? Do we even have the correct skills on the team to answer this question or did we only hire ROS people?"

Re: Robotics and ROS 2 Essentials

#98

Post by yalogin »

aktenlage wrote: post #85
yalogin wrote: post #64

This is exactly what I am researching right now. I am working on a project build a robot that maps its surroundings and walks around. The goal is to learn some AI (slam and camera based ML) and also hardware (Robot itself). I am thinking of raspberry pi with cameras and then using just building the slam algo from scratch. Is this a good option or am I trying to bite off more than I can chew. I understand ML theory bu…

Depends on what you want to learn. The SLAM Frontend (computing motion information from sensors) offers a lot of variety through the chosen combination of sensors (wheel odometer, IMU, mono/stereo/multi camera, lidar, radar, sonar, to name a few). At least for vision, deep learning should be very useful. For the others I have no experience how much machine learning is relevant. Geometry and physics based methods shou…

Thanks for the input, would you recommend developing slam from scratch or start with some libraries and tailor it to my sensors?

Re: Robotics and ROS 2 Essentials

#99

Post by dvrj101 »

causal wrote: post #46
sashank_1509 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Isn't Foxglove built for ROS?

https://foxglove.dev/blog/introducing-foxglove-schemas-to-vi...

Re: Robotics and ROS 2 Essentials

#100

Post by dtquad »

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…

Which would you choose to do real-time robotics with C++ on Linux/PREEMPT_RT with CUDA support?
Post reply on HN