If you haven’t heard a word about this extraordinary thing then, welcome to the world of real robotics.
Now take a case, if you want to make a line follower robot or self balancing robot, then it is obvious that “arduino” will come to your mind.
If you are not aware of what this “arduino” is then,let me just brief you about it.otherwise you can skip the following paragraph.
Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments. Arduino community is very much vast,you will get the code for almost for everything. You can directly plug it to the PC and transfer the code to it. And it’s really simple. In your college tenure you will find many projects backed by arduino.
But what if I say you to make robot that can do functionality like videos shown in the previous page?
if you want the functionalities like
- Image process
- Trajectory planning
- Grasping
- Object Tracking
- speech recognition
- and many more in your robot
Then you need a better platform to work upon.
Yes I’m talking about the ROS (Robot Operating System).
(Pronounce it like “Ros” not like “Arr Oo Ss”
let me brief you about this game changer. yes, you heard it right.
Basically ROS is not any operating system, but it is meta-operating system. It provides a platform for the codes and algorithms to run. ROS is an Open Source. It provides the simulation tools, Physics simulators, pre-built packages ,stack to directly use for your project.
For more details, this is the home page of ROS: http://www.ros.org/
Just see this video, so that you will come to know about the capabilities of ROS.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z70_3wMFO24
You probably would notice in the video that, many teams that take participation in DARPA Robotic challenge uses ROS. ROS Community has grown very much in last 8 years. It just changed the way of Robotics by stating that “ Stop Reinventing the Wheel”.
Now you will understand why I said it a game changer.
Now some technical part:
ROS runs on PC, laptop or on embedded systems.
ROS has many distributions (versions) in alphabetical order, box turtle, C turtle, Diamondback, Electric Emys, Fuerte, Groovy, Hydro, Indigo(2014), Jade(2015) and Recent one is Kinetic Kame(2016).
- There is a ROS release every year in May.
- Releases on even-numbered years will be a LTS(long-term Support) release, supported for five years.
- Releases on odd-numbered years are normal ROS releases, supported for two years.
So for newer user, as on date, recommended distribution for installation is Kinetic kame.
There is one painful thing that most of you will feel,
ROS works on Linux.Yes, in order to use ROS, you need the Ubuntu. for Kinetic Kame recommended version of Ubuntu is 16.04(xenial xerus).
If you don’t have Linux installed on your laptop, you have two options to have Ubuntu.
- On other OS using Virtual machine
- Dual Boot with your current OS
I recommend to install Ubuntu as dual-boot with your current OS.
Next page Contains the detailed instruction to install Ubuntu( 16.04) as dual-boot.
If you have the laptop installed with Ubuntu then you can simply skip the next page.