Understanding ROS Build Systems

A build systems is a functional program or scripts developed to automate and simplify compiling and linking source code.  A meta-build system like CMake  generates native makefiles and workspaces that can be used in the compiler environment of your choice. CMake is a powerful open-source cross-platform set of tools designed to build, test and package…Read more Understanding ROS Build Systems

Step-by-step guide for contributing to Open Source projects

Contributing to open source projects can feel very daunting in the beginning. A good way to get started is to contribute small changes such as bug or documentation fixes. Most open source projects publish guidelines which outline best practices and contributors are sometimes invited to attend meetings to discuss the direction of the project. Regardless…Read more Step-by-step guide for contributing to Open Source projects

Step-by-step Autoware.Auto installation guide

Open source autonomous driving projects have simplified autonomous vehicle development, particularly where resources are constrained. Popular projects include Apollo (an open autonomous driving platform), openpilot (an open source driver assistance system), CARLA (an open source simulator for autonomous driving research) and Autoware.Auto (an open source autonomous driving platform). This article focuses on setting up a…Read more Step-by-step Autoware.Auto installation guide

Extracting Images and Sensor Data from ROS bag files to Python

The ROS bag file format is popular in robotics, where it is used to store ROS message data. Several tools for working with ROS bag files exist, such as rosbag (a tool for recording, playing back, and filtering data), rqt_bag (a tool for visualising rosbag data), rostopic (a tool for listing and echoing the content…Read more Extracting Images and Sensor Data from ROS bag files to Python

Converting the KITTI dataset to rosbags

The KITTI Vision Benchmark Suite dataset is a popular robotics dataset from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago. Several benchmarking datasets are provided including stereo, flow, scene flow, depth, odomerty, object, tracking, road, semantics and the raw data. To use this dataset in ROS, the streams should first be converted to…Read more Converting the KITTI dataset to rosbags

Integrating the Hokuyo URG Lidar with ROS

The Hukuyo URG is a lightweight, affordable USB powered lidar sensor. It outputs a single planar scan with 240º scanning range at 0.36º angular resolution and scan rate of 100ms/scan. This sensor can be used for, amongst other things, indoor mapping or collision avoidance. There is presently no pre-compiled driver available for ROS kinetic so…Read more Integrating the Hokuyo URG Lidar with ROS