So I wanted to talk about all my frustrations with a robot operating system and my experience
building Ross Powell robots.
So first of all, I think Ross is great for academia and industry.
So if you think about universities, they're often you can improve a small component.
And you can just focus all your time work on that.
Then getting the whole stack for free is amazing.
In industry, you can spend a lot of time, like actually get paid to learn how to use things.
And you get a very powerful stack for free.
However, I think a lot of spare time hobbyists have different needs than the groups which
Ross is currently addressing very well.
And when I think about myself as a robot hobbyist, I often notice I'm more budget-constrained
and that makes Ross harder.
I often want to have something move as fast as possible.
And I want to have Ross as a high level platform for new behaviors.
So what I want to do in this talk is give some insights into what problems hobby robots
system might encounter.
Maybe we can as Ross community think a bit about how we can better cater to them.
And I also want to introduce a new Ross package for an affordable robot to make robotics
easier to get into.
So first of all, for the robotics on a budget, if you're asking people, like whenever
people say, hey, I want to get into robotics, often you tell them, hey, why not use Ross?
And the absolute best way, playing with the P.D. games.
Now, the absolute best way to get into Ross is buying one of the third robots, which cost
740 euros or 3.2 for the third of all four, but that's quite steep to get into a new
hobby in my opinion, whereas something like the F.M. Rover, this one, I'm actually doing
it off, and it's on table.
So something like this only costs 100 euros.
You need to have your own Raspberry Pi, but I think everyone who is interested in robotics
probably already has one.
So this is way cheaper to get into this new hobby.
So I made Ross two package in preparation for the stock for this robot.
The other thing which I often notice when talking about Ross and when working with Ross
is that my goal, as I hope, is that what I think makes Robotics fun, is have anything
move as fast as possible, right?
You want to be able to drive to a room, you don't really care about his going straight line
or not.
However, if you take a look at the tutorials and like Ross website, you start with Odyssey or
I-Tools or the Klein libraries to be fair, it's a good start because you're going to spend
all your time debugging this stuff, but it's not very fun.
It would be more fun if we can get people started with anything which moves a bit.
And then you can start introducing them to, if you want to improve this, this is what
you need to know about topics, this is what you need to know about publishes and subscribers.
But there is material out there which helps you, like for example, the construct makes
great tutorials, where at least you can very quickly see a robot in simulation.
I still want people to actually have something physical moving through the living room.
And the last point for me is I want to see Ross more even more as a high level platform.
So I think as hobbyist, you want to be creative, you want to make a robot which brings
you beer or a cloud mat, and you don't want to end up debugging in your roster, which
is what's happening in practice to be honest.
And I think that a lot of their roles, components, are very high level, but you need to
have like a laser scanner, have like a map of your house, leg of this is quite well.
There's also some good tools like FoxLaw, which help you get insights into your set
quite quickly, so more of those components would really help us.
If you want to use my package, when preparing this talk, I create a package for these robots.
I hope it can lower the entry bar into robotics and it can be in a affordable start into
your robotics journey.
You can find it here, reach out to me, help me to ignore person.
Yeah, that's it.
Thank you very much.