ROS-I Americas Puts On Training at Wichita State hosted by Spirit AeroSystems

This July, the consortium conducted a training at Wichita State University (WSU), more specifically National Institute for Aviation Research (NIAR), hosted by Spirit Aero Systems, from July 16th-18th. The attendees contained consortium members from Spirit Aero System, NIAR, Iowa State University, and Santa Clara University. This training was a great first exposure for those who haven’t touched ROS 2 before, while those more seasoned in ROS development got to dip their toes in motion planning with Tesseract. There were many moments where the attendees realized how they could apply these new skills to current and future projects.

This training was solely in ROS 2 Humble. On the first day the attendees were split into two groups: beginner ROS developers and advanced ROS developers. The beginner group focused on learning the fundamentals of ROS, covering workspaces, publisher/subscribers, services, and launch files. The advanced group learned about motion planning with Tesseract. On day 2 the groups came together to learn about creating URDF/XACROs to describe a robot, and using Moveit2 for motion planning in a simulated environment. The third and final day contained attendees working through the Perception Driven Manipulation Demo and moving a real-world robot.

All instructions for the ROS Industrial Training are available online. The template and solution code can be found on the ROS-Industrial github.

Special thanks to Spirit AeroSystems for enabling this training to be held at NIAR/WSU and thanks to NIAR for providing the Universal Robot for the laboratory exercises.

Next training will be in October, so stay tuned to the ROSindustrial.org events page for those details as they are finalized!