OVERVIEW

The Research Track II Course aims at providing students with advanced concepts needed for developing software for robotics and for presenting their results. Frontal lessons and class exercises will help the students in learning and analyzing the most relevant instruments in these contexts, such as ROS, ROS2, notebooks, simulation environments, data visualization libraries and software documentation tools.

AIMS AND CONTENT

LEARNING OUTCOMES

Robotics is a multi-disciplinary field characterised by a high degree of research. Research Track 1 and Research Track 2 are aimed at developing a series of must-have know-how and expertise that any researcher in Robotics must be acquainted to. In particular, Research Track 2 will consider subjects related to project design, development, assessment, reporting, as well as ancillary knowledge as experimental methodologies, data visualisation, bibliography research, pitch presentations.

AIMS AND LEARNING OUTCOMES

Active participation in the proposed training activities (lectures and laboratory activities), individual study and the realization of projects will allow students to:

- use some specific functionalities of the ROS framework (e.g. actions)

- know the principles of ROS2 and its main differences w.r.t. ROS

- develop software architectures in ROS2

- interface their code with simulator environments such as Gazebo and CoppeliaSim

- create some effective visuals for showing data

- use notebooks for controlling and managing robotic simulations

- write proper documentation for the developed code.

PREREQUISITES

The course is the ideal continuation of the Research Track I course.

TEACHING METHODS

Teaching methods consist of frontal lessons and class exercises.

During frontal lessons, examples related to the implementation of the different aspects will be shown.

Class exercises will be performed individually or in groups

SYLLABUS/CONTENT

The course program consists of the following topics:

- Actions in ROS

- ROS2 and differences with ROS

- Nodes, topics and services in ROS2

- ROS1/ROS2 bridge

- ROS2 components and containers

- The CoppeliaSim simulator

- Data visualization and Matplotlib

- Jupyter Notebook

- Software Documentation, Doxygen and Sphinx

RECOMMENDED READING/BIBLIOGRAPHY

All slides shown during the lessons and other teaching materials will be available on the Aulaweb platform. Generally speaking, notes taken during the lessons and teaching materials uploaded on Aulaweb will be sufficient for the course.

TEACHERS AND EXAM BOARD

Exam Board

CARMINE RECCHIUTO (President)

RENATO UGO RAFFAELE ZACCARIA

FULVIO MASTROGIOVANNI (President Substitute)

LESSONS

LESSONS START

https://corsi.unige.it/10635/p/studenti-orario

Class schedule

The timetable for this course is available here: Portale EasyAcademy

EXAMS

EXAM DESCRIPTION

The exam consists of an oral test, which is a discussion about the projects carried out during the course. Indeed, the completion of 2 projects, which will be proposed during the course is mandatory for the final exam. 

ASSESSMENT METHODS

The oral exam and the projects aim to ascertain the following aspects of the students' preparation:

- Acquired knowledge about robotic programming with ROS and ROS2

- Ability to use the CoppeliaSim simulator, and to integrate it with ROS/ROS2

- Ability to use tools for data visualization and presentation

Exam schedule