Become a roboticist challenge

Intro

This month I am following Dr John Vial 's 28-day robotics challenge.

The program blends ideas from teaching sprints, atomic habits, and the build in public manifesto.

I will document the process and share daily progress updates and key learnings in this repo as well as this twitter thread

Check out also my notes on the Live Sessions

To Do

• investigate the /slam_toolbox node using ros2 note info /slam_toolbox and see what it is publishing. Maybe there is something you can use there?
• fork, symlink or copy bar_ws to commit changes
• move large files (currently inside raw_video folders) somewhere where they will be backed up e.g. in Dropbox

The Challenge

Video	Day	Title	Highlights
	Day 0	3 Ways To Get You Computer Setup With Robotics - The easy way, the hard way and the dangerous way	Setting things up. The repo provides a containerized environment super easy to setup. Leveraging WLS, docker and the Dev Containers VS Code extension eliminates the need to fiddle with dual boot, ubuntu or ROS installs version compatibility, or dependencies.
	Day 1	The Right Way And The Wrong Way To Drive A Robot	Day 1 started off easy with some simple teleop in simulation. Two highlights: first, I loved the 3D-scanned real scene in Gazebo, way more immersive than your usual turtlebot tutorial. Second, I finally got the chance to test OBS Studio for video production. Check the video!
	Day 1_Bonus	3D-Scanning And Importing Real Scenes Into Gazebo	I got trapped in this rabbit hole: scanning a real scene with Scaniverse, repairing the mesh in Blender and Instant Meshes, making a simplified collision model in FreeCAD and importing it all into Gazebo
	Day 2	How Robotic Systems Communicate And How You Can Listen	Day 2 brushes up on basic ros2 CLI commands which came actually handy as I spent ages troubleshooting pesky issues that prevented running the Krytn teleop. In the end it had probably been me clumsily touching things from inside and outside the container who caused the problem in the first place. In the meantime, the "Hard way" (running ubuntu "baremetal", no containers) is still not working for me.
	Day 3	Robot Eyes Why You Need To See Through Them	Day 3: looking through the eyes of the robot
	Day 4	Don't Let Your Robot Become Lost - How To Give It A Map	Day 4: mapping Game City café and exploring the contents of the launch files. I am now working bare metal in ubuntu 24.04, and it makes a difference: gazebo, rviz visualizations run smooth!
	Day 5	Self Driving Robot? How To Make A Robot Autonomous	Day 5: ROS2 package Nav2 enables autonomous navigation. Under the hood, a global planner calculates the best route to the goal using a static global costmap, and a local planner constantly scans for obstacles near the robot in a local costmap, and updates the path to avoid surprises.
	Day 6	How To Control An Autonomous Robot With Code Instead Of A GUI	Day 6 - we wrote a ROS2 Python node to publish directly to /goal_pose instead of manually clicking to choose a destination. Useful e.g. for docking the robot, although in practice it'll need much more refinement - actions, waypoints, sensors etc. Started to explore waypoints but had to move on.
	Day 7	How To Use CAD To Create Custom Robot Links	Day 7 - sketching a simple accessory for the robot in FreeCAD. The course touches on sketching over images/drawings, thinking pads and pockets, and keeping the model simple. From experience, I would add: using repositories of 3D models for components such as GrabCAD, and exporting the simplified model to STL.
	Day 8	How To Add Your Custom Link To Your Robot	Day 8 - I finally could give the CROSS FreeCAD workbench a try today, and I am impressed. Just the GUI interface to determine frame of reference transforms for joints and links and the 1-click export for a full robot description package make it well worth the setup effort. Another highlight was the URDF/xacro walkthrough and troubleshooting tips. Oh, and my Krytn robot is happily driving around with a shiny new tray.
	Day 9	3 Steps To Finding Problems To Solve With Wheeled Robots & How To Choose When You Have Too Many	Day 9 - the task today was to research on configurations and applications of wheeled robots. I got so carried away I ended up making a long(ish) video and uploaded it to Youtube.
	Day 10	How To Control A Robot Arm - The Easy Way	Day 10 - First contact with MoveIt, the ROS2 package for robotic arms. From simple pick-and-place to advanced manipulation, MoveIt simplifies a lot motion planning and control. Plus, the spawning sequence at launch needs a bit more attention.
	Day 11	7 Useful Commands That Will Let You Interrogate Any ROS 2 System	Day 11 -Time to take the plunge into the ROS2 CLI. As a bonus, I came across ros_network_viz and gave it a try - way better than the old rqt_graph to visually explore a ROS2 system, their elements and interdependencies
	Day 12	3 Steps To Designing A Simple Gripper In CAD	Day12 - making a gripper for the robotic arm using FreeCAD and the CROSS workbench
	Day 13	How To Install A Gripper On Your Robot Arm In Simulation	Day 13 - installing the new gripper on the robotic arm, this time directly editing URDF and XACRO
	Day 14	How To Setup The ROS2 Standard For Joint Control And How To Control Joints With Code	Day 14 - configuring ros2_control for the gripper joint and creating a node that makes it move. Quite involved, and couldn't quite make it work reliably
	Day 15	The Easy Way To Setup Your Robot Arm - Configuring MoveIT 2	Day 15 - configuring my_robot_arm involves defining self-collision, planning groups, named poses, ros2_control and MoveIt controllers, launch files… ROS is very verbose, so this means a zillion lines of python, yaml & urdf. Fortunately the MoveIt wizard guides you step by step and writes all the code for you ready to be integrated in your package. Mind you, there's a fair amount of manual tuning needed and I spent hours troubleshooting obscure error messages. Still worthwhile if we compare this with the effort it took on Day 14 manually configuring a single joint!
	Day 16	How To Control A Full Robot Arm With Code	Day 16 - writing a ROS2 node in Python that allows autonomously operating my_robot_arminstead of having to manually select positions then launching Plan & Execute
	Day 17 (part 1)	How To Create A Gazebo World - Adding Something To Pickup	Day 17 – Part 1: Care for a Coke? I spawned a coffee table and a can of Coke into my simulated world, and taught the robot arm how to pick up the can. We no longer have a robot in the void, now we can actually do something useful with it - a massive leap forward. But teleoperating the arm while looking across to the Gazebo screen to "guesstimate" is really hard work. There must be a better way, and there is!
	Day 17 (part 2)	How To Create A Gazebo World - Adding Something To Pickup	Day 17 - Part 2: Catch me if you can! Adding a RGB-D sensor (a depth camera) really helps - we can now see through our robot's eyes in RViz. Still, grasping is a remarkably difficult problem in robotics and it seems that our current setup does a terrible job at modelling friction
	Day 18	How To Stop Your Robot Arm From Hitting Things - Adding Collision Avoidance Sensors To Your Robot Arm	Day 18 - Safety first! Today I set up MoveIt with 3D perception to plan safe trajectories - and keep the robot arm from crashing into things. However, gripping requires contact! I wrote a ROS2 node to disable collision avoidance in the vicinity of the Coke can, so the robot could eventually grasp it. RViz has been most unhelpful recently, constantly misbehaving, crashing and throwing tantrums. Still, with some help from Dr Vial, I managed to make it.
	Day 19	How To Find Problems That Robot Arms Can Solve And How To Choose One
	Day 20	A Starter Template For Designing Wheel Robots In CAD For ROS
	Day 21	3 Things To Consider When Choosing Your Robot Project
	Day 22	How To Use Photos To Quickly Create Realistic Robot Models In CAD
	Day 23	Exporting Your Robot From FreeCAD And Configuring ROS 2 Control So You Can Teleoperate It
	Day 24	3 Tips To Create a compelling an environment for your robot
	Day 25	2 Important Sensors To Consider Adding To Your Robot
	Day 26	How To Iterate On A Robot Simulation To Make It More Realistic
	Day 27	How To Configure Mapping & Navigation So Your Custom Robot Can Drive Itself
	Day 28	How To Control Your Custom Robot With Code To Make It Really Autonomous

GIT