Americas Puts on Updated ROS 2 Training with Revamped Motion Panning Special Topic

This July, Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) hosted the most recent ROS Industrial training workshop. A large group came in from around the Americas region to learn a mix of ROS 2 fundamentals and advanced topics, as well as explore the city of San Antonio.

ROS-I trainers and students gathered to enjoy dinner out in San Antonio

To start the workshop, beginner students worked through the basics of ROS 2, while those already familiar with ROS were walked through our freshly updated exercise on performing motion planning with Tesseract. All students then came together to learn about setting up their robot URDF, do motion planning with MoveIt, and process pointclouds using PCL. Notably, these students were the first to experience the ROS-I training fully in ROS 2 Humble. No more spending time during training wrapping your mind around ROSbouncing between ROS 1 and ROS 2 1 just to get MoveIt up and running.

The students were also given a tour of Southwest Research Institute’s robotics facilities, where they got to see what they were learning in action. SwRI demonstrated a scan-n-plan application that utilized the ideas of motion planning and perception taught during training.

Students observing the demonstration of a scan-n-plan application on a physical robot

All training materials can be found on the ROS Industrial Training wiki. From there, you can download preconfigured VMs and jump right into exercises, or, if you want to stay on your own machine, our GitHub repository hosts a script that will install everything you need automatically.

If you are interested in hostingattending or organizing a future training, please reach out to a team member! We are always excited to bring our knowledge and expertise to you.