ARC ROS Tutorials

After my sophomore year, I began developing tutorials to teach ROS (Robot Operating System) to incoming members to the Autonomous Robotics Club of Purdue. We use ROS internally, and it is a useful skill to have since it is used heavily in industry and research.

Contrary to the name, it is not an operating system to install on a computer, but it is a framework designed to make programming robots easier. It allows you to create a network of intercommunicating nodes, where each node is typically a process performing a specific task. This strategy makes code re-use easy and makes it possible to leverage 5000+ open-source packages to jump-start a new project.

The downside is that ROS is very complex and difficult to learn. To combat this, I developed my own tutorials that are short and focused on what I thought was most important. They’re based around building a simple AI for the snake game, which gives the learner an end goal to accomplish. They are written for Python and have been tested to run on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

The club first used them as part of onboarding in the fall of 2020 and continued to use them the following year. My original tutorials can be found in the club’s GitHub repository, and an updated version can be found on the club’s wiki.