Welcome to Part 2 of our series, where we're talking about creating your first robot with ROS and Ubuntu Core. In part 1, we discussed all the hardware necessary to follow this series, and introduced Ubuntu Core, the operating system for IoT devices.
Today, I'm going to introduce you to the Robot Operating System (or "ROS"), and we'll use it to move our robot. We'll be using ROS throughout the rest of the series.
By the way, remember that this is also a blog series. The link is in the description.
So what is the Robot Operating System? Well, at its simplest, ROS is a set of open-source libraries and tools meant to ease development of robots. It also provides an infrastructure for connecting various robotic components together.
In the CamJam worksheets, we've been doing everything in a single script: controlling the motors, reading from senors, etc. It gets more complicated every time we add something, and changes become harder to make.
ROS provides a communication infrastructure that allows you to extract different logic into their own modules, and have them communicate with each other in a standard way, making changes easy.
This will make more sense once we dive in, so let's get started!
The first step is to install ROS on our Raspberry Pi. There are a number of supported ROS releases, but we're going to use the long-term-support release, called Kinetic.
Let's SSH into our Pi, and get into our classic shell.
Kinetic's installation guide, which we're following here, is linked in the description.
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