Assignment 1

In this assignment, you will perform two tasks:

  1. Setup ROS in your system.
  2. Bring up the Turtlebot3/4 robot in the required simulated environment.

What you submit are screenshots of the ROS CLI commands as well as the screenshots of the Gazebo and RViz2 that show the robot in the maze world.

Points:

Bringup ROS in your system.

Most of you are new to ROS but luckily you have access to a book that starts from the very basics and the associated video series by the same author.

The setup can be somewhat involved or seamless depending on your platform. We provide instructions for the following platforms although we can only test the native Ubuntu platform. Please note that the book does the installation using a VM. Please avoid going down that path especially when a docker-based development is feasible.

Ubuntu and MAC Users

Install docker in your system and the VSCode docker and remote extensions.

Tip

Although we havent tested the assignment on MAC, it should work and there is a lot of evidence out there that it does.

Windows users

  1. Install WSL2.

  2. Ensure that you also follow this tutorial to setup VSCode properly aka the VSCode can access the WSL2 filesystem and work with the remote docker containers.

  3. If you have an NVIDIA GPU in your system, ensure you have enabled it.

Launch the ROS application/project

  1. Clone the course repo here.

  2. In most instances you need to just follow the README instructions and do a docker compose build followed by docker compose upto bring up the containers.

Note

  1. The course docker container has been borrowed from another repository and some of the docker compose instruction in the README refer to the name of the original repository. Simply change the name to the name of the course repository.

  2. If you find the docker based environment setup challenging you can install ROS2 straight into a ubuntu shelll prompt (native or WSL2). Having said that, you need to be careful which version of ROS you install as there is a mapping between ROS and the version of the Ubuntu OS. Humble goes with Ubuntu 22.04 and Jazzy with Ubuntu 24.04. Note also the MAC users should not attempt to install ROS2 without docker - it does not work. Report any issues in the relevant class Discord thread.

Source: Bringup ROS in your system.