Blogs

Following our previous iteration, and after receiving feedback from the community our team is glad to present "blanco" Debian Jessie image from Erle Robotics. This image valid for Erle-Brain 2 chances include:

• Matplotlib installed
• MAVProxy (docs)
• Dronekit 2.0.0rc8 (dronekit page)
• WiFi boot time upgrades
• Added scripts for switching vehicles in Desktop
• Added Picture script
• Added ROSimple, a multiplatform simple way to program robots using ROS.
• Disabled graphical target at boot, Desktop can now can be launched with sudo systemctl start lightdm

We're specially excited about ROSimple which we open sourced here. This work came out the training experience we've been having over the last months:

For several weeks we taught different groups (going from the high-shool level to the PhD one) how to make use of our robots. While most of the people quickly understand the different mechanical parts of a robot, understanding the underlying software is something that took quite a bit of effort.

When making our training sessions, one of the first things we try to introduce is the concept of the Robot Operating System (ROS). While there're many resources on this topic, it's a fact that learning ROS takes some effort even at the PhD level so we started prototyping ideas to make this proccess as simple as possible.

We wanted to reach high schools students so we realized that we had to remove the assumption of "coding skills" from the equation. This made us look into systems like Scratch for robot programming. The output of these prototypes has become ROSimple. A multiplatform web-based tool for programming robots and drones that use ROS. In fact, ROSimple itself is a ROS package.

ROSimple support for APM (through mavros) is currently being explored:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPNr4d6ZwMo

"blanco" can be obtained from here.