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Getting Started
If you want to be able to write and run ROS packages on your personal computer, you will need to download a virtual machine and install linux. You can download Oracle VM virtualbox, a great virtual machine, from their website. You want to download ubuntu linux on your virtual machine, either 14.04 (what the current operating system is on all the turtlebots in the lab) or 16.04 (what all the turtlebots will eventually switch over to). This website (https://linus.nci.nih.gov/bdge/installUbuntu.html#createvm) does a good job walking through all the steps to install and set up ubuntu on your virtualbox. Make sure when you download ubuntu that you select the 64 bit version.
The next thing you want to do is complete the beginner and intermediate ROS tutorials found here (http://wiki.ros.org/ROS/Tutorials). The beginner tutorials are definitely more important, and give you most of the tools you need to use ROS effectively.
The next thing you want to do is complete this (http://www.cs.tufts.edu/comp/50AIR/homework/comp50_hw6.pdf) homework assignment, which should be done on the turtlebots in the lab. To start up the turtlebots, grab one from the charging station and turn on the laptop on top of the robot, and turn on the base of the robot (there’s an on/off switch on the right-front side of the base). The password to log in is “turtlebot”. Once everything is turned on and you’ve logged in, it’s best to open “terminator” (you can access it by searching for terminator in the top left search icon) and split the terminator screen into 3 or 4 windows so you can run all the packages you need to in order to map and complete the other tasks in the homework. To split the terminator screen, right-click in the window and select "split horizontal" or "split vertical".
Now that you have been able to write your own simple ROS program, the next step is to delve more into ROS techniques and what sort of research you can do here at the lab! This (http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~pstone/Papers/bib2html-links/IJRR17-khandelwal.pdf) article talks about all the moving parts of successful autonomous robots in a building like Halligan, and can give you ideas of what sort of project you might like to be a part of. There are quite a few other ROS tutorials that are very helpful to complete as well:
- Urdf tutorials: http://wiki.ros.org/urdf/Tutorials
- Tf tutorials: http://wiki.ros.org/tf/Tutorials
- Actionlib tutorials: http://wiki.ros.org/actionlib/Tutorials
There is also a Baxter robot simulator if you want to become more familiar with that model, you can find information on that here (http://sdk.rethinkrobotics.com/wiki/Baxter_Simulator).