Good Morning from my robotics lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I’m going over my progress so far. Let’s get started.
Now that I’ve written about getting the site up and a few vague goals, I want to explore some relevant research I did before I went off to start blogging about said research.
ROS. That is about the first, term you should hear when first looking into hobby level robotics. ROS (Robot Operating System) is, surprisingly, not quite a OS (Operating System) for robots. My understanding is that it’s more like a program that manages robot parts. It’s free, open source, and used at all levels of robotics, including some commercial products. Just don’t use it for something that absolutely must not get hacked or someone could die. Security, I hear, was more of an after thought.
Linux is the more familiar name for the do-it-yourself type of computer OS. Personally, I’ve used Windows since I first taught myself Chess on Windows95. Guess which OS ROS runs on. Answer: Linux. Guess what my second major goal for this project is going to be. (Tip: the first goal was my first post.) Answer: Install Linux and learn more about it. Now, I’ve had some minimal exposure to Linux at both my high school and university (both used Windows primarily). I’m not a “What’s Linux?” type of guy, but I’m no alien to it either.
Gazebo is another program I read about related to ROS. It’s some sort of robot simulator. I don’t know much about it, except It primarily runs on Linux, and that you better know what you are doing if you dare set it up on any other OS *Windows*. I think it prefers to run in Ubuntu, but I’ll check that out later.
Anyway, since Linux keeps popping up everywhere I look during my preliminary investigations, I figured I’m not going to have a good time if I try to get anywhere without it. I set out to install Linux on my desktop; my SSD was full, even after relocating a sizable file and picture archive. Somewhere on Gazebo’s site, they recommended against just running Linux off a flash drive, which would have been my next investigated solution. I finally caved and bought a new SSD to install so I can dual boot my machine. It was about that time I decided to start this little blog sidequest. Besides, the more I learn, the more ambition this project goal seems, and I can use all the help I can get.
That pretty much brings you up to date with my research so far. As of this posting, I have not installed the drive. That’s in next week’s topic. I plan on uploading a video where I perform the upgrade.
Final question: While my ultimate goal is to assemble the software side of things for free, paid stuff still might be beneficial to look at. (Think, “They did it, now can I?”) What software should I look into?